


Lost in the Echo VIII

by flamethrower



Series: Re-Entry: Journey of the Whills [48]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Genre: Alternate Universe, Droid Feels, F/F, F/M, GFY, M/M, Sith Obi-Wan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-30 18:12:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5174108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/pseuds/flamethrower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What did you do *that* for?"</p><p>"For science!"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost in the Echo VIII

**Author's Note:**

> Beta conducted by Norcumi and Jabberwockypie, both of whom are awesome and not to be taken lightly.
> 
> This chapter was stupid late, but that's because I keep damaging myself and not noticing until I've compounded the problem by a lot. Whoops. I'm getting better, though, and you guys get NINETY-ONE PAGES out of the deal.

Imperial Year 27: 2/9th

Alliance-observed Old Republic Date 5239

Lothal

 

“It’s confirmed, then?” Silver asked.

Viffax made a sound that was pure frustration. “It is. The Imperials were able to ambush our first meeting with the Alliance via the Alpha Eight encryption.”

“Dammit.” Syndulla rested her chin on her hands, discouraged. “They finally cracked it.”

“Well, it only took them twelve years,” Jarrus pointed out. “That’s a hell of a run for one of our encryptions.”

“ _Chufta-nee_. And it likely happened because we were using it more often.” Viffax eyed the Alliance group. “No offense.”

“None taken. We knew it was a risk,” Bridger said. “It’s not like we don’t have others.”

“The only concern I have is the amount of time it might take to get the word out that the Alpha-Eight is compromised. Outposts and command vessels are easy enough to safeguard, but the agents in the field?” Syndulla glanced at Silver, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry, Prime Minister, but I need to leave. It will be safer to send the message out from a neutral area, and the faster it’s done, the better the chances for our agents.”

“All of you?” Grey asked, tilting her head in Wren and Orrelios’s direction.

Syndulla and Jarrus looked at each other, having a silent conversation that looked quite a bit like one of Ben and Mara’s telepathic discussions. “I’m okay with it if you are,” Jarrus said.

“Right. I’ll take the _Ghost II_ out with Chopper. The others will stay here and help with your restructuring efforts,” Syndulla said. “They’re mouthy, but they get the job done.”

Orrelios rolled his eyes and huffed a sigh. Wren smiled up at him, resting with her arms crossed over her chest. “To be honest, Prime Minister, I’m a lot more effective at destroying things—at least if there’s not any painting to do.”

“I just want you all to stop calling me Prime Minister.” Silver was resigned to the inevitable among the general public, but in private, she really did prefer her name over a title.

“This gets you used to it faster. Immersion,” Jarrus said. Given that Silver had not once heard any of the others call him Knight or Jedi, she had a feeling that Jarrus preferred his name over titles, also.

Once Black had escorted Syndulla out, Grey looked at Jarrus and Bridger in irritation. “It’s too bad you can’t also help with the political situation.”

Jarrus shook his head. “We’re spies, not diplomats. You want one of the Alliance’s negotiation teams for what your sister is proposing.”

“Huh. Thought all the Jedi were diplomats,” Fitz said.

Jarrus’s flinch was so slight, Silver didn’t even think he was aware of it. “Were we taught the basics of behaving in a political setting? Sure. But negotiation and diplomacy—that’s more advanced, and it gets more specialized if you concentrate your skills there. Sixty-Six happened before either was an option for me, Bret.”

Fitz grimaced. “Shit. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting how young you would have been when that happened.”

“It’s okay. Long time ago,” Jarrus said.

 _Liar,_ Silver thought. Jarrus was like Ben; Sixty-Six was still a nightmare, a literal wound they could not walk away from. She gave him a sympathetic look, but otherwise didn’t comment on the sore subject.

“Master Kenobi could do it,” Jarrus continued. “I was old enough to remember that he was one of the Order’s best negotiators.”

“We’d just need to actually get him _back_ here,” Orrelios said. “I was out tossing Imps during that pathetic little insurrection we had a few hours ago. Did anyone get word from the twins, Tano, Jade, and that walking dead man yet?”

“No. We still haven’t heard anything since they cleared the outpost four days ago,” Wren said. “Viffax?”

“No updates here, either.” The Aqualish muttered in his own language, ending with an emphatic, _“Ghuuthgh.”_

“Yeah, they’re probably in trouble,” Orrelios translated.

“No, no—they’re fine.” Bridger had his head canted to one side, his eyes unfocused. “Probably frustrated, but they’re not in danger.”

“Master Kenobi is, though.” Jarrus closed his eyes and rubbed at the back of his neck. “It’s like an itch under my skin.”

“Aw, you’re just allergic to Lothal,” Orrelios teased him. “It’ll be fine. Besides, the Jedi already died once. He’s probably really hard to get rid of.”

“Are you sure?” Bridger asked the Lasat.

Orrelios snorted. “Course I’m sure. I’ve never managed to get rid of _you_.”

Bridger grinned. “You’d be hopeless without me, Zeb.”

“I’m leaving before this devolves any further,” Grey announced with a badly hidden smile. “C’mon, Hival, Viffax. Let’s go see how the refurb is going on the old Senate building. My sister needs a real office, not a hole in a tunnel.”

“The rest of you will _also_ be required to park your rear-ends into real offices,” Silver called after them, pleased when her threat evoked groans of dismay.

She sat back down on her desktop, resting her hands behind her so that she could stretch her spine. She’d only been government for a few days, and it was turning her into a knotted mess of awful tension. It was impossible to forget any of the responsibility looming down upon her, including the Chiss flagship in high orbit above Lothal, which had remained at her request. Things had been so hectic that sleeping for four straight hours would be a blissful experience. Instead, it was almost dawn and they had yet to sleep at all, still plotting Lothal’s future.

When her spine had granted her several loud pops of resettling tendons and happier joints, Silver looked back at her Alliance advisors. “How are Gein, Travaill, and the others faring?” That was one of the updates she’d missed, and aside from Ben, it was the news she most wanted to hear.

“Well, Jones was stubborn, and almost messed up the entire process,” Bridger said. “He didn’t want to believe he had the sleeper command stuck in his subconscious until we activated it.”

“And then I had to hit the poor bastard.” Orrelios sighed. “I finally get to start punching Imps, and they’re the wrong ones.”

“Dammit, Jones,” Silver murmured. “How did he take it afterwards?”

“Not bad,” Wren said. “He didn’t threaten to shoot himself, at least, which is what Hival says Gein did right after he woke up from being rifle-slugged.”

“We’re not really the right people for this, either. Ahsoka would be better—a Jedi Master even better than that. The absolute best would be a Jedi Mind Healer, and…” Jarrus hesitated. “I’d say that we know there aren’t any left, but there are suddenly eight Jedi in the galaxy when last week, there were four. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and a Healer will turn up, too.”

“A Healer would be a pleasant bonus, but believe me, the Lothal are more than happy to make do with what has been presented to us,” Silver reassured him. “I want these men to be able to trust their own heads, the sooner the better. How is Gein faring now?”

“Gein cooperated so well that I was worried he was going to shove everything he’d ever done into my head,” Jarrus said, chuckling. “I like the kid.”

Wren grinned. “I like anyone who gets beat in the face with Rex’s rifle and then decides that Rex is to be adored.”

“We still don’t know about Sergeant Travaill yet, though. He’s barely been conscious long enough to listen to us, let alone accept any kind of deprogramming.” Bridger scratched at his chin. Silver couldn’t tell if the young man was trying to grow in some sort of scruff, as his teacher had, or if he’d simply neglected to shave since arriving.

Scruff or no scruff, he’d grown into a beautiful man, dark-haired and dark-skinned, with vibrant blue eyes like both of her own had once been. Were it not for the fact that Silver had settled herself firmly upon the asexual spectrum in her early twenties…

Well, that and the fact that Sabine Wren did not seem to be the sort to share.

“The good sign for Travaill is that he knew right afterwards what he’d done, _and_ that he didn’t want to do it,” Fitz said. “With that recognition already in place, shouldn’t that make it easier to get rid of that _Maget’tra_ nonsense?”

“Maybe,” Jarrus allowed. “Still, we won’t know for certain until we can get him to focus for more than five seconds at a time.”

Silver let the conversation flow on around her, recognizing that the others were about to reiterate oft-spoken ideas. She did not sigh; she was too good of an actor for that.

She missed Mara. She missed their quiet evenings and mornings, holding or being held, awkward and settled, settled and awkward again. There had been nervousness and giggling—that Mara would _never_ admit to—as she and Silver had both attempted to learn, or re-learn, the simple comfort of another human’s embrace. Silver did not see Mara adopting asexual ways, but her training under that foul bastard Sidious had left her barely cognizant of her own desires, and with little to no concept of platonic pleasurable touch, let alone sexual.

“We’ll just have to wait and see—”

Silver felt like she must have missed a step, but her eyes had never left Jarrus. One moment he was talking; the next, he was on the floor, his hands clasped to his skull, screaming like someone was flaying the skin from his bones.

Shock kept her half deaf for brief heartbeats. Then she heard Wren cry, “Ezra!”

Silver turned to look, he mouth opening in voiceless apprehension. The younger man hadn’t fallen, but his head was thrown back, teeth bared, fists clenched at his sides as he echoed his teacher’s screams.

“What in the _hell_ is going on?” Orrelios roared. He was frantic, looking back and forth as if he couldn’t figure out which of his friends to assist first.

“It’s like Alderaan,” Wren whispered, and Silver felt her mouth dry up, her skin burn hot.

No. Not again, not the loss of another world. It could not be.

“Ezra!” Wren shouted, just before Fitz snagged Wren’s hand and pulled her back from the dirt beginning to swirl in the air. Bridger was still caught up in whatever was happening, but air currents moved around him. The small contained storm captured particles and pebbles and even one of Silver’s styluses. Bridger’s hair was flying loose and sparks burst into being—and the Jedi seemed to be entirely unaware of any of it.

Fitz grabbed Silver and pulled her in close to his other side, shielding Silver and Wren while Orrelios protected Jarrus. Silver had seen Lothal’s adopted Jedi through some strange things, but this was far more frightening than self-digging tunnels or one of Ben’s crackling snaps of temper.

Then Bridger started shouting, the echoes of each word bouncing off the tunnel walls: “Kashyyyk! Ossus! Ord Varee! Corellia! Byss! Akinnea! Tholoton! Noori! Thila!”

“Planets. Karrabast!” Orrelios gave Jarrus a vicious shake. “Pull yourself together, Kanan! Your kid’s lost his damned mind again!”

“Dear gods,” Fitz whispered. “I hope this doesn’t burn him out.”

Bridger gasped. His hands were curling inwards, the cords on his neck standing out in sharp relief: “Yavin IV, Malastare, Ganatha, Nar Shaddaa, Mandalore, Nam Choriso, Rishi—!”

Jarrus was on his knees, white-faced. Orrelios was holding him up with one massive hand. “Padawan! That’s enough! Let it go!”

“Dac! Second Fleet! Stygeon Prime! Fourth Fleet!”

“Padawan, no!” Jarrus shouted.

“Dammit.” Wren solved the problem by pulled her blaster and stunning Bridger mid-word. Silver choked back a startled cry as he fell.

“Sabine!” Jarrus rasped, still trying to get his legs underneath him so he could stand. It wasn’t working very well; Orrelios was holding him upright with a resigned look on his face. “Please stop shooting my Padawan.”

“Yes, but he’s _my_ boyfriend, and thus I get a certain number of shots per year,” Wren replied in a cheerful voice, but her entire demeanor went soft as she went to Ezra and rolled him over. Silver hissed in a breath; Bridger had taken the fall hard, and both his nose and lower lip were bloody.

“Thanks for the rescue,” Bridger said in a cracked voice. “Love you too, Sabi.”

Wren smiled as she brushed Bridger’s hair back from his eyes. “I’m allowed to shoot you again if you call me that more than once a year.”

“Yep,” Bridger said with a smile, and then passed out again.

Fitz helped Silver to stand—unnecessary, but she was in no mood to brush off his kindness. “Jarrus? Wren? Orrelios? I would like it very much if you would explain what it is that we’ve just witnessed.”

“I need a drink first,” Jarrus said, dropping down onto a chair while Orrelios picked up Bridger and, at Silver’s direction, stretched the young man out on her desk. It was not ideal, but better than the chilled ground.

Fitz pulled the flask from his hip and handed it over. “Homemade, kicks like a brazen bitch, but it’s smooth on the way down.”

Jarrus smiled. “Probably the best selling points I’ve ever heard for rotgut,” he said, and took a shot. He swallowed it down and then proceeded to turn a blotchy red as he coughed. “Shit, you were right. She _kicks_.”

When everyone seemed settled, and no further instances of strange Force phenomena appeared, Silver sat down next to Jarrus. “Explanation, please.”

Jarrus took another drink before answering, making a bitter face over Fitz’s terrible homebrew. Ben wouldn’t even touch it, and Ben was desperate for alcohol that wasn’t spice-laced. “It was…when certain things go wrong, it results in something like a pressure wave in the Force. It will spread out from that original point in all conceivable directions. The further out from the central point, the less harsh the wave will be—but you’ll still be _aware_ that it happened.”

“Like Alderaan,” Silver murmured.

Jarrus sniffed hard and then pressed his face against the side of the metal flask. “Yeah. You felt it?”

“Not myself, no. There are a few sensitives among the surviving population, none strong enough to attract the Empire’s notice. But when Alderaan was destroyed, we knew.” It had taken another solid ten-day for the official story to get to Lothal, and that had been a great bunch of rancid-smelling nonsense.

“That wave, just then—that was a powerful Force sensitive’s mental shielding breaking down,” Jarrus said.

“Ben.” Silver pressed her lips together, composing herself, before asking, “Is he dead?”

“No. Not yet, anyway,” Jarrus replied. “But now the search team will be able to backtrack the wave to the central point. They’ll find him.”

Silver nodded, understanding that it was all they would know of Ben’s fate until Jade’s team sent word. “And Bridger? Why was he shouting planet names?”

“And parts of the Fleet,” Wren added in a quiet voice. “Fourth and Second, I heard.” She was perched on the desk next to Bridger, a watchful sentry with multi-colored hair and a gaze that promised death to anyone who tried to hurt her boyfriend.

“Does anyone even know where Ganatha is?” Orrelios asked.

“Way the hell out and beyond Nar Shaddaa. Not all that easy to get to,” Fitz answered him.

“When Alderaan happened, I knew it was bad. I could feel the echo of it, but it wasn’t…it wasn’t crippling.” Jarrus closed his eyes for a brief moment. “Alderaan was a hell of a way to find out that your Padawan is an empath.”

“You mean in the true sense of the term—those who are emotional telepaths,” Silver said.

“Yeah.” Jarrus emptied the flask in one long swallow and then gave the container back to Fitz. His cheeks were a bit red, but his eyes were bright and clear. “I think Ezra was riding that wave. It’s extremely dangerous, and I never, _ever_ want him to do it again…but he may have given us something we didn’t have before.”

“Nightmares about the two of you screaming?” Fitz asked bluntly.

“Fitz, be nice,” Silver discouraged him. She didn’t want her subconscious latching hold of that idea.

When Jarrus looked up at them, there was a faint, genuine smile on his face. “I think Ezra was connecting with other surviving Jedi.”

“Dear gods,” Silver whispered. “Eighteen planets. Two different sections of the Alliance Fleet.”

Jarrus nodded. “At least twenty possible survivors of the Purges.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

Tamoeth knelt on the floor next to his sister, eying the black hilt that jutted up from her face like an obscene decoration. He could appreciate the beautiful, vengeful irony of the tableau, but this _was_ his only sister. He would not laugh at her plight, no matter how much she deserved it.

Tiritha stared up at him with her remaining eye. She did not blink; her pupils did not constrict. She was on the verge of death, but had not yet been thrust into the Void.

“Well, dear sister? How did this happen?”

 _Traitor_ , she told him in a weak hiss. Tamoeth caught the impression of a man in civilian dress, with familiar scars upon his face. Naasade.

“I did warn you that your tendencies towards collecting shiny objects would be your undoing,” he said. “You brought this upon yourself.”

 _Save me,_ Tiritha demanded.

Tamoeth shook his head. “I cannot heal the damage without removing the knife, and I cannot do so quickly enough to prevent your death.”

_There must be something you can do!_

“There is.” Tamoeth grasped the knife’s hilt. “Goodbye, sister,” he said, and pulled the blade free. Tamoeth heard her shriek in rage, but then the Void called, and Tiritha was gone.

He used Tiritha’s clothing to clean it before studying the blunted, bent end of the blade. It would still serve its purpose.

Tamoeth stood, turning his attention back to the base commander. “Where are they?”

General Vüqar came to attention. “There is no sign of them on base surveillance. It looks as if the commander tampered with the security monitors for the primary corridors, and we have no sign of him after he left the barracks. However, his security code has been recorded at one of the maintenance exits.”

“When?”

“Five minutes ago, sir.”

Tamoeth frowned. An escape into the city did not _feel_ right, but he could sense no hint of Venge, or of Tiritha’s ill-favored commander. “Very well. Mobilize your forces, General. There are no allies for a Rebel in the capital, and no place to hide. Find them…and please,” he added, favoring the General with a cool smile. “Make certain that you bring both of them to me alive. She was my sister, after all.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

Anakin woke up feeling like someone had parked a starship on his head. A large, heavy, _piercing_ damned starship. “Ow.”

“Took you long enough.”

Anakin rolled over on the bunk, wincing with every movement. Rex was sitting on the opposite bunk, leaning against the wall. He was reading from the datapad in his left hand, but there was a blaster pistol resting on the blanket next to his right hand.

At least the lights weren’t at full strength. Anakin wasn’t sure he could handle bright light at the moment. “How long was I out?” He sounded a lot better than he felt.

“Ten hours.” Rex glanced up from the datapad. “Stop panicking. The nav-comp is still trying to calculate a flight path to the coordinates you wrote down. Current estimate is at least another hour, maybe more, before we can make the jump.”

Anakin managed to breathe out before tension could curl him into a knot. “I wrote something down?”

“Wrote it on the floor, actually. While you were still shouting.” Rex sighed and dropped the datapad onto the bunk. “You’re making it really damned hard for me to stay mad at you.”

“Sorry.” Anakin sat up and then shut his eyes when the room tried to spin. If this was what psychic overextension felt like, then Obi-Wan was absolutely crazy for ever allowing it to happen for a second time, let alone the third and the fourth.

“Yeah.” Rex waited until Anakin could look at him again. “What are they doing to him?”

Anakin flashed on lava, heat, fire and burning and dear gods, he deserved it, he—

“Whoa. Hey.” Rex was sitting next to him, and Anakin had no idea when that had happened. The weight of Rex’s hand on the sleeve of his shirt, registered by the bionic interface underneath, felt strange and out of place. “It’s fine, Skywalker. You’re all right.”

Anakin nodded, trying to breathe. Flashback, fuck, he absolutely hated those, and had managed to avoid one for a nice, solid month. He’d been doing well, dammit!

Rex waited until he’d more or less pulled himself together. “That bad, huh?”

Anakin nodded. “Do you remember when Brakes lost the use of his arm?”

Rex snorted. “As if I could ever forget. He picked up more foul language from being out for six months than most of the brothers did in a year. Heard most of it when I had to tell him he was off the piloting roster.”

“I was—I didn’t want to tell him, or anyone else, in case I couldn’t do it.” Anakin ran his fingers along the gold edge on his right hand. Body heat transference had been something he’d figured out fast, not wanting to touch Padmé—or anyone else—with cold metal fingers. “I was working on a neural recognition and relay system. It would have replaced the mechanized braces, and no one would have had to give up and submit for an amputation just to get a working bionic replacement. No need for nerve replacement surgery.”

“Which they wouldn’t give to a brother, anyway.” Rex sounded bitter. “Too expensive.”

“Exactly.” Anakin swallowed. “I almost had it. I’d already figured out the synth-flesh contact interface, and from there it was…I think maybe I’d already finished the design, but I can’t remember. I must have. They’re using it.”

“I know the synth-flesh fix went out, because it’s everywhere now,” Rex said. “Haven’t heard a damn thing about this relay system, though.”

“Because the Adepts stole it.” Anakin laced his fingers together just to keep from clenching his fists. It was taking an alarming amount of willpower to not blast a hole in the wall. “They turned it into a torture device. It, uh—” Anakin bit his lip and almost drew blood. “It—”

“I get it.” Rex tightened his grip on Anakin’s arm. “What are they making him feel?”

“What it’s like to be set on fire.” Anakin tried to smile, trying to take the weight out of the words, but it was a miserable failure. “Except it’s not just one time, it’s, uhm…” He twirled his fingers in a circular motion.

“Cyclical.” Rex’s dark skin lost about half of its color. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.” Anakin felt his eyes burn just as his vision blurred. “Shit,” he said, trying to wipe his face clean. It just wasn’t working very well because he couldn’t stop crying.

Rex sighed and pulled Anakin into a hug. Anakin bit back a gasp and clung to Rex like a desperate, half-drowned womp rat. He could not afford a complete emotional meltdown. Not right now.

Rex gave him a few minutes before he said, “I’m still mad at you.”

Anakin let out a choked sob that was half laughter. “Okay.”

“I’m serious.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Anakin said, after pulling back and wiping his face. “You can shoot me _after_ we save him.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

He awoke to complete darkness, riding a wave of panic so intense that the scream was already building in his throat.

Then a hand came down on his shoulder, a gentle touch, not the cold prodding of the droids or of Tamoeth’s icy fingers. “It’s all right.”

The voice was familiar, and there was a wealth of information in those three words: All was well, he was safe, and there was no immediate danger. He bit back the scream, swallowed it down until he was certain it would stay put, and passed out again.

The second time was easier. Waking slowly gave his eyes the chance to adjust to the dark. There was enough light in the room to provide the outline of shapes, hints of detail. The room was cold, like the chill of a deep cave. He was lying on the floor on a thin, self-heating pad, part of the standard gear in a stormtrooper’s e-kit. He recognized his own leather jacket by scent, and by the weight of it draped over his chest.

Realizing he could not feel the Force was a gut-clenching jolt, one that almost allowed the panic to eat him alive. He’d had that back, it had been his only damned comfort—

Recognition of the man sitting next to him helped. He choked down the panic as he had the earlier scream he barely remembered wanting to voice.

Cody’s face was illuminated by the display of the datapad he held. He was so much older now, but the scar on the left side of his face was the same, as was the steady calm in his dark eyes. There was swollen skin and dark bruising around his nose, damage from a recent break. He almost thought he remembered it happening, a strike to the face from a slender, powerful hand, but wasn’t certain of the memory.

Cody’s hair was not white, but a silver-edged gray. That would have irritated the Kaminoans to no end, who were fretful enough of the random blonds and redheads that had cropped up among their otherwise perfect clones.

He must have made a sound. Cody lowered the datapad and looked down at him. “Hey. You okay?”

 _No,_ Obi-Wan wanted to say, but he understood what Cody was really asking. “For the moment,” he said aloud, and winced at the sound of his own voice. Tiritha had kept repairing the damage he’d done to his larynx, but the last session of also-torturous healing had been…some time ago.

 _It’s no fun if we can’t hear you,_ she’d whispered into his ear, a crystalline recollection that sent cold fingers of dread questing along his skin.

Obi-Wan cleared his throat, ignoring how much it hurt to do so, and tried again. “Where are we?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.” Obi-Wan did remember killing Tiritha with the fucking binding blade that had kept him pinned, grinding the knife into the duracrete floor with vicious satisfaction. He recalled leaving the cell, one dead man being supported by another. Beyond that, he had only vague impressions of standard Imperial gray hallways.

Obi-Wan pushed himself into a sitting position, clenching his jaw when his left arm throbbed a painful warning. It was bound from wrist to elbow, and there was a lingering scent of bacta rising up from the bandages, almost masked by the layer of waterproofing agent. His joints were bitter, broken-glass agony. His head ached; his skin felt too hot, like he was still on fire—

 _Not actually burning._ It was extremely difficult to push the panic back down again, its strength fueled by anxiety and terror, but he managed it. He could go find an empty room and scream to his heart’s content later, but not until the Adepts were all dead and they were both safe.

Obi-Wan sighed and leaned against the wall next to Cody. “Tell me?” he asked, doing his best not to sound desperate.

“We’re in the heart of the base,” Cody said. “Went to ground in one of the lowest levels.”

Obi-Wan stared at him in dismay.

Cody snickered at him, the bastard. “I wouldn’t have gotten very far hauling your unconscious ass around. They expect us to run; it’ll take them a while to realize we didn’t.” He turned the datapad so that Obi-Wan could see it, displaying a map of the entire structure. “We’re here,” Cody said, pointing at a room on one of the lowest sections, highlighted in green. “Those two red-flags up there? Those are the Adepts, passing through security doors.”

One of the Adepts had passed through an external door, timestamped fourteen hours ago. The other red flag marked passage five minutes ago through a door on the ground level of the base. That was four levels above their heads, and still it was too close for Obi-Wan’s comfort.

There were also at least twenty orange stamps for senior officers. Obi-Wan swallowed back dryness and the foul taste in his mouth. “This is command-level access—the admiralty, the Moffs, the generals. How did you get this?”

“Had it from the beginning, actually.” Cody handed him an uncapped bottle. “Don’t drown yourself.”

The water tasted flat, and he did not give a single fuck. It rinsed days of awfulness out of his mouth and soothed the rawness at the back of his throat. His splitting headache eased down to somewhat more bearable levels.

Cody dropped the datapad into his lap and scrubbed at his face. “Marshal Commander was the highest rank in the Imperial military at first, aside from the generals and the Moffs. They got it sorted out, eventually, but I think they forgot about me. Never revoked my access.”

There was a lot Obi-Wan could say to that, but he didn’t have the vocabulary for it—not yet, not when the two primary things eating up his attention were panic and pain. Keeping both at bay was exhausting him, and he’d only been awake for a few minutes.

“The chemical inhibitor?” Obi-Wan asked. He knew it by the sour taste on the back of his tongue, something the water couldn’t wash away.

“Stole it,” Cody said. “Injected us both. Didn’t want to be that damned obvious.”

Obi-Wan managed to smile. “Smart. How long do we have?”

“If the Adepts and base command follow procedure, there will be external grid searches for another six to eight hours before they know for certain we’re not hiding out in the city somewhere, and traffic beyond those borders tends to be easily noticeable.” Cody was being careful not to look at him. “I called for help, but they’re still at least thirty-three hours away. Maybe more.”

Obi-Wan eyed him, curious and cautious. “You’re Alliance.”

Cody nodded. “Yeah. Six years now.”

“All right.” Obi-Wan slumped down until he was resting his head against Cody’s left shoulder. The physical contact was reassuring, familiar, and would help keep the fucking panic at bay. “Wake me in five and a half hours,” he said, and was asleep before he heard a response.

 

*          *          *          *

 

“Where are we?” Wolffe asked.

Mara turned her head to look at Tano, who was frowning down at the navicomp. Wolffe and Rex were just behind Tano, holding up the rear wall of the cockpit. “That is a very good question.”

“Still waiting for navigation to orient itself,” Tano answered. “Wait, here—we’re at the tail end of the Beshqek system.”

Beshqek system. “Deep Core Security Zone,” Mara said, the recognition sending a quiet thrill down her spine. “We must have jumped right past the blockade.”

“There’s another secured zone?” Skywalker was seated next to Mara in the co-pilot’s chair, but was politely keeping his hands off of the controls. He appeared to be doing a lot better than he had been ten hours ago, when he’d stumbled out of the second cabin looking like something that had been mauled in a speeder wreck.

Mara smirked at him. “Didn’t the Emperor ever tell you _anything?_ ”

That got her a derisive snort. “No.”

Rex interrupted any further attempt to mock Skywalker. “I take it this one’s separate from the secured area around Coruscant.”

“Separate, and secret. The Deep Core zone was meant to safeguard the Emperor’s personal retreat.” Mara nudged the controls, letting the ship turn in a slow drift so that the sensors could get a clearer scan of the system.

“I always did wonder why he abandoned the one on Coruscant,” Skywalker said.

“You mean the one that used to be in the Industrial Zone?” Mara asked.

Skywalker looked at her from the corner of his eye. “Obi-Wan blew it up, didn’t he?”

Mara nodded. “Two hundred thousand square meters.”

Skywalker grinned. “Awesome.”

“I see you are both still solving all of your problems via explosions,” Tano said dryly.

He shrugged. “It’s effective. But if this is where Palpatine moved all of his side projects, then I’m leery about going in guns blazing.”

“Oh, now that’s a switch,” Rex said, and Mara had to bite her tongue. Being surrounded by individuals who communicated primarily by sarcasm was growing on her.

“Palpatine kept Hssiss on Coruscant.” Skywalker’s face twisted up in a grimace. “Force knows what he was up to out here.”

“Hssiss.” Most of her amusement dried up in an instant.

“What, the Emperor didn’t tell you about that?” Skywalker asked. Mara glared at him.

“That is a lot of Star Destroyers,” Tano said, as the scan results began filtering in onscreen.

“Twenty,” Rex said, once the final count appeared. “And here I thought the blockade around Lothal was overkill.”

“They’re all concentrated around the fifth planet in the system—it looks like a secondary blockade just for that planet.” Tano frowned. “Given the lack of activity, I don’t think they’ve noticed us yet.”

Skywalker turned his chair around so that he could see the navicomp. “That won’t last long.”

“That bastard is _dead,_ ” Wolffe muttered. “What are they all still doing here?”

“The Adepts have a lot of sway, thanks to Iceheart.” Skywalker turned back around to look at the viewscreen. “Or there’s still something strategically important out here.”

“Please tell me that we have a way in. I’m not helping you lot attack twenty SDs with a freighter that’s missing a third of her original construction,” Wolffe said in a flat voice.

“Two fighter squadrons against a Death Star,” Rex reminded them. “Just two.”

“Still more firepower than we’ve got right now,” Wolffe retorted. “I’d like a little bit more of a strategy than, ‘Try not to die.’”

“Trying not to die is a given.” It was definitely Mara’s preference. “I have my own security passes, but I don’t know if any of them are still valid.” Isard might have found them all, or she could have missed half of them, but Mara had no way of knowing _which_ codes would work. A competent commander would be shooting at them by the third failure. That was unacceptable; this rescue mission was going to succeed. She was going to save her idiot teacher, and then yell at him for a month solid for putting her into such trying, irritating, _worrying_ circumstances.

“They don’t need to be.” Skywalker looked uncomfortable. “I have one we can use that’s valid—I checked its status a few weeks ago.”

“I really don’t think I want that lot panicked that Darth Vader is alive and coming to pay them a visit,” Rex said.

Skywalker’s smile was strained and humorless. “It’s not attached to his name. It was reserved for the insurrection.”

As if on cue, the comm activated with an incoming transmission. “Unknown vessel, you have entered a Level 1 secured zone. Please transmit proper authorization codes immediately, or prepare to be boarded.”

“Well, boarding is a step up from being shot down,” Tano said thoughtfully.

“Not that much of a step.” Mara looked at Skywalker. “Do you want me to—”

“Nah, I’ve got it. I’m the least likely of all of us to have a voice ident still on file,” Skywalker replied. He toggled the comm just as the warning message began repeating itself. “Lieutenant Kaleo of the merchant freighter _Indrani_. Hi there, sorry for the delay. It’s my first trip out this way.”

“Hi, yourself,” the Imperial on the other end answered, a touch less sour than he’d sounded a moment ago. “This is Lieutenant Adilet of the _Lethal Vector_. You’re our first visitor in weeks. Transmit your code verbally, please—we’ve had some trouble receiving data packet transmissions this far into the Deep Core.”

“You got it, transmission beginning now: Besh Besh Isk Krill Two-One-Nine-Five-Zero-Zero, Ush Thesk Trill Shen Five-Five-Five-Eight-Three-One-Four, Class Two-One-Nine.”

Mara turned off the comm pickup and stared at Skywalker. “You stole a Two-One-Nine?”

“I didn’t need to steal it. Someone gave it to me,” Skywalker said, and then held up one finger to request silence as he turned the comm back on.

There was a very quiet, “Holy _shit_ ,” and then the strangled cough of someone who’d just been badly startled. “Merchant vessel _Indrani_. Code…code confirmed. I need to—I need to clear this with Command.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Skywalker took a breath that was definitely for show. “You don’t tell everyone the surprise inspection is coming. Kind of spoils the surprise, and believe me, you don’t want to spoil this for the lady in question.”

“I—I…is it _her,_ Lieutenant?” Adilet asked in a hushed voice.

“No, it’s not the primary, but she _is_ one of the higher ranking—fuck, hold on, she’s coming,” Skywalker blurted in a rush, and then gestured at Mara with a smile.

 _Stop making me like you,_ Mara thought at him, and then bent closer to the comm. Every single chilling thread of the power she’d once held was in her voice when she asked, “Is there a problem, Lieutenant?”

“Uh—no,” Adilet squeaked, and then cleared his throat. “No, there’s no trouble, my Lady. There is a five-hour flight from your location that I do apologize for. I will make sure that a corridor is cleared for you when you arrive in Byss orbit.”

“See that you do,” Mara said tersely, and leaned back in her seat.

Skywalker gave it just the right amount of time before he spoke again. “Sorry about that. Five hours, huh? What about a micro-jump?”

“Not in this system, Kaleo. Not if you want to live, anyway,” Adilet said. “Should I have ground clearance provided in advance, also?”

Skywalker hesitated for a beat. “No, I think that would also spoil the surprise. Set it up once we’ve passed through the SD corridor.”

“Close timing. I heard Grand Moff Tarkin used to play it like that.”

“That was before my service began, Adilet.” Skywalker had a queasy expression on his face. “ _Indrani_ out.”

“I thought Vader and Tarkin were friends,” Mara commented once the comm was off.

Skywalker gave her a look of complete disbelief. “Okay, first off? Vader didn’t have friends. Second? He tried. To execute. My Padawan. Fuck _him_.”

“It’s nice to know you’re still grumpy on my behalf,” Tano said, amused. “Where did you get a Two-One-Nine Intelligence pass from?”

Skywalker’s eyes flashed with what Mara thought might be regret. “Wulff Yularen.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

Cody almost bolted when Kenobi turned him into a fucking pillow. It was mindful of a hell of a lot that he’d spent too much time trying to forget, and spoke of a level of forgiveness that he was pretty sure he didn’t deserve.

“Shit,” he whispered, and rested his right hand on the weapon lying at his side. The weight against his left shoulder partially immobilized him, but if the day came when he couldn’t fire a rifle one-handed, he was walking off a cliff.

Five hours passed a lot faster than Cody had any right to expect. He was used to long watches with no damned point, with nothing but endless stretches of ocean and stormy sky. He wasn’t used to sharing that kind of time with people he liked, let alone someone who’d once been one of the best friends he’d ever had.

The last half-hour, Cody kept his eyes glued to the datapad after the second Adept’s security code showed up on the ground level, announcing his return. All of the doors that led to their location were security-locked, which would give them a few minutes’ warning if anyone approached, but the longer the Adepts stayed four floors above their heads, the happier Cody would be.

Kenobi jerked himself awake a full minute before Cody was scheduled to wake him. “Good timing,” Cody said, and then grimaced in sympathy when the only noise Kenobi made was of a man trying not to whimper.

“Here,” he said, handing over two patches. “Double shot of a potent anti-inflammatory, unless you’ve finally gained some fucking sense about stronger pain meds.”

Kenobi peeled both patches and pressed them onto the inside of his wrist. “Not really.” He sighed as the patches kicked in. “Fuck.”

“We’re going to need to move soon,” Cody said. “Are you up to it?”

“I don’t think I have much choice. I’d really like a shower, though.”

“You’re in luck.” Cody turned on the emergency lantern, making sure it was set to the dullest glow possible. It was still too bright after twenty hours of darkness, but it was also a nice change.

“It’s a locker room.” Kenobi sounded amused. “You are brilliant. Do the taps work?”

“I’m not brilliant, I just know how to plan ahead.” Cody pushed himself to his feet, trying to shake the stiffness from his bones. He _hated_ being old. “I know the sonics work, but even if there’s water, the intake might be monitored. Probably best not to chance it.” He reached out and grasped Kenobi’s hand when the man listed to one side while trying to stand up. When he was certain that Kenobi wasn’t going to fall over, Cody handed him a compressed kit.

“Just basic blacks,” he explained, when Kenobi did nothing more than give the kit a blank, uncomprehending stare. “Better than nothing, and a hell of a lot better than that shredded mess you’re still wearing. Your boots are good, though.”

“Right.” Kenobi lifted his left arm, examining the bandage. “What happened here?”

Cody snorted. “You ripped the neural rod out of your arm in your rush to kill yourself an Adept bitch.”

Kenobi shook his head. There was a weird look in his eyes, something that looked a hell of a lot like sorrow. “That does sound like something I would do.”

“Which one? Hurting yourself, or killing an Adept?”

Kenobi’s response was stone-dry. “Both.”

Cody started to pack up while Kenobi hit the sonics, but a moment later he heard a loud curse and the sound of something breaking. “Dammit,” he muttered, grabbing his rifle and heading around the corner.

Kenobi was shirtless and white in the face, staring at the sonic bank. One of the emitters had cracked cleanly in half. “What the hell?” Cody hadn’t realized the inhibitor had worn off, or that sonics were apparently terrifying.

“I didn’t expect it to hurt.” Kenobi covered his eyes briefly with one hand. “Oh, I did not need that kind of adrenaline surge right now.”

Shit. “Sonics on an overloaded nervous system.” Cody felt like an idiot. Familiar sensation or not, he still didn’t like it. “I’m sorry, I should have remembered that.”

“Remembered?” Kenobi looked at him in concern. “What—”

“Twenty years of neural overstimulation.” Cody felt his chest tighten. “Use the water. I’ll keep an eye on the pad to see if any alerts pop up,” he said, and left the shower area like every foul entity in all seven Sith hells was trying to follow him.

He was paranoid for nothing; water use was either not monitored, or nobody was paying attention. Probably the latter. Imperial procedure existed for a reason, but you couldn’t always account for sentient error and stupidity.

The chemical inhibitor in Cody’s system wore off while he was rolling up the self-heating pads into a single, compressed roll. The sour taste on the back of his tongue vanished just as the oppressive atmosphere of the base fell down on his shoulders like a sodden, slimy blanket.

Kenobi came out when everything was packed up, his hair still hanging in limp wet strands. The man had always looked striking in black, which was one of the primary reasons he didn’t wear it. His General had spent a lot of time trying _not_ to attract attention.

Not that it had ever worked very well. “You look better,” Cody said. There was a pinched set to Kenobi’s mouth, his brow furrowed either from pain or stress, but it was still a hell of an improvement over trapped and bedraggled.

Kenobi didn’t seem convinced. “Thanks,” he said, prodding at the edge of bandage on his left arm. He’d pushed back his sleeve; black fabric and white bandage clashed together at the elbow, a damning reminder that Cody had been five seconds too slow.

 _No, enough of that,_ he ordered himself. He could take a long damned trip on the guilt express once they were out of danger, but not right now.

“We should get moving.” Cody held up the datapad to show off the screen. “They’re starting to grid-search the base, and if those Adepts start looking…”

“I can do something about that last part.” Kenobi studied the screen for a few seconds, probably memorizing the base’s entire layout. Then he put his hand on Cody’s shoulder.

Cody desperately tried to pretend that the sudden, casual touch wasn’t alarming in the slightest. It was too fucking normal, and things hadn’t been that way in a long time. “What are you doing?”

Kenobi’s eyes were unfocused, like he was studying something that Cody couldn’t see. “Making sure that they can’t see you,” he murmured, just as Cody felt—felt something, a sensation he couldn’t define. The sense of oppressive Darkness didn’t fade; instead, it was like the atmosphere felt less heavy. The feeling of being watched, that itch between his shoulder blades, was all but gone.

“That’s not like an inhibitor,” Cody said, if only to mask his discomfort.

“Not at all, but it is _very_ effective,” Kenobi replied. “How much time before we can expect company?”

“They’re probably scanning for life signs instead of relying on visual confirmation.” It was what Cody would do, and he’d rather take no chances and assume that someone competent was in charge. “It’ll slow them down, though. Maybe an hour before the first squad gets to this level.”

“That doesn’t sound very efficient,” Kenobi said. “Have standards fallen that far?”

“The base is only staffing about a third of the personnel needed for a place this size. It should be easy to stay out of everyone’s way.” Cody thought about it for a moment. “Or to clean house. One or the other.”

“Tempting, but no. They would just call in reinforcements, and I’m…not at my best,” Kenobi admitted.

Cody raised an eyebrow. Dear gods, the passing years really could make a man less fucking stubborn. Kenobi would have sooner eaten his boots than to admit any such thing during the war. “Didn’t think you would be.”

“Then thank the Force, one of us is intelligent,” Kenobi said with a wry smile.

Cody shook his head. “Sometimes. I have two pistols and a rifle. Pick one but not both, because if you leave me without a means to shoot that Tamoeth fuck, I’m going to be kriffing pissed off. No, I don’t have a preference,” he added, when Kenobi gave him a curious look.

Kenobi glanced down at the matched set of blaster pistols, both of them holding a fresh charge. “The rifle. I don’t have two reliable hands right now, but you do.”

Cody handed it over, watching as Kenobi ran his hands along the stock, finding safety, adjustable sight, trigger guard, and the release for the power pack by feel. “One extra charge only, though. Make your shots count.”

“Understood.” Kenobi grabbed the worn strap and slung the rifle over his right shoulder, wincing when the strap put pressure on the healing knife wound. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen a lightsaber around.”

“The Adepts don’t have it. I think it was left behind on Lothal,” Cody said.

Kenobi lifted his head, his eyes widening. “Lothal. Cody, did they—”

“Imps lost—pretty badly, from what I overheard. Your people got themselves ten SDs out of eleven.”

“Oh.” Kenobi’s shoulders slumped in relief. “That’s good news, but what in the entire fuck are we going to do with ten SDs?”

“I’m sure they’ll think of something.” Cody hesitated. “Look…Obi-Wan. Are you going to be good for this?”

Kenobi drew in a deep breath and let it out. “Again, I don’t see as I have much choice. Next question, though: What the hell are you doing here?”

Cody shrugged, affecting a casual air. “It’s all about being in the right place at the right time to be the most effective.” Kenobi blinked a few times before smiling in recognition of his own words. “You owe me an open tab at a cantina, by the way. I had to be nice to that woman.”

“I did save your life,” Kenobi pointed out.

“That’s a different kind of debt entirely.”

“Ah.” Kenobi tilted his head, as if curious. “You shot at me with a cannon.”

Cody had been wondering when Kenobi would get around to bringing that up. His stomach clenched, but he refused to avoid the question. “Yeah.”

Kenobi regarded him with a studiously neutral expression. “You shot at me with a cannon, and you _missed._ ”

It took him a moment, but when he got it, Cody was hard-pressed to keep from smiling. “You were riding a fucking lizard!”

Kenobi’s eyes were finally vibrant in the way Cody remembered, even if the color was off. “Sorry, all I hear is, ‘Can’t properly aim a cannon.’”

“Fuck you, too, sir,” Cody retorted, and when Kenobi hugged him, it felt less like teeth-gnashing discomfort and a hell of a lot more like coming home.

 

*          *          *          *

 

Imperial Year 27: 2/10th

Alliance-observed Old Republic Date 5239

Beshqek System, Byss

 

Doing a bit more comm chatter back and forth with Lieutenant Adilet got them a quiet landing spot outside of the capital city. “Retreat, huh?” Anakin had said on the comm. “What kind of name is that for a city?”

“An accurate one, I guess. I was never here when the Emperor visited, but that’s what this place was for. Good luck with your Lady’s inspection, Lieutenant Kaleo.”

“I’ll bet you a tank of caff that this entire city is Imperial from top to bottom,” Wolffe said as he walked down the freighter’s boarding ramp.

“I’m not taking that bet,” Rex replied. “But if it’s Imperial…” He looked at Ahsoka.

Ahsoka frowned and touched her montrals. “I may be the only non-human in the entire region. I suppose that means we can’t simply walk straight up to the front door.”

“Stealth it is,” Anakin said, coming down the ramp. He was already wearing his cloak, hood up. Ahsoka knew he had all four lightsabers on his person, his own and Obi-Wan’s, but she couldn’t see them. To all appearances, he looked like a base mechanic fighting a hangover.

“Use that vocorder of yours,” Jade advised, exiting the ship last. She flipped open the secured panel next to the ramp and entered two different security codes. The ramp closed with a soft whine; Jade turned to them with a smirk on her face. “If anyone tries to steal this ship, they will not like what they receive.”

“You two going in cloaked and Jade blending in with her civvies is all well and good, but _we_ won’t blend in. I doubt they get a lot of Mandalorians around here.” Wolffe traded amused grins with Rex. “I’m not leaving my armor behind. The last time I did that, I got shot.”

“It was your own damned fault, too,” Rex said, then looked to Anakin.

They all were, Ahsoka realized. It was part-instinct, part old habit, and a great deal of the natural air of command Anakin radiated when he had a goal in mind.

It was strange to realize the differences between them, even now. Vader’s aura of command had held the chill of inevitability, of things falling into place because they must. Anakin captured their attention because of his fiery drive to succeed, coupled with the cheerful acceptance that anything could go wrong, and probably would, but they’d fix it anyway.

Force, but she had missed him so much.

“Forget blending in. I don’t actually think we should announce ourselves so blatantly.” Anakin glanced up at the sky, tracking the Beshqek sun, which was far to the east, painting the sky in lilac and pink. “The city will be full of shadows we can use. Let’s take advantage of them.”

Getting to the military complex was easier than Ahsoka expected. The streets were mostly empty, and those that were not were easy to avoid. The city was not yet awake, which kept people off the streets, and there seemed to be no sentries posted anywhere

Wolffe was right—it was Imperial, top to bottom. These were the homes of the families for officers staffed on the base, for non-com service members and their families. The open shops they passed were manned by droids, or by green-clad human men and women who were blatantly military, even if they seemed to be unarmed. There were no open-air markets, no casual gatherings, no hint of night-time entertainment, and absolutely no sign of a homeless population. The entire city gave Ahsoka a terrible, creeping feeling…except, she was coming to realize, it was not just the city. The Force had been too chaotic to read from orbit, but down here on the soil?

Byss was a _Dark_ world. It teemed with it, chaos and rage and foulness that twisted the currents of the air and made Ahsoka’s skin feel unclean. She suspected that if it were not for that chaotic interference keeping the worst of it at bay, this would be a truly oppressive place to live.

“This place smells foul,” Rex said, when they took a short break halfway to the base.

“It smells _sterile_ ,” Wolffe countered, pulling his helmet and glaring down at the street, three levels below. “What the hell is wrong with this city?”

“It’s been utterly saturated by Darkness,” Anakin said. His eyes were closed, but he didn’t seem distressed; it was more of a listening posture. “I think there must have been a wellspring here, one that was corrupted by Darkness.”

“This city hasn’t been here that long.” Jade was running her fingers along the edge of the building. “A lot of this is pre-fab, but it’s newer construction. I think Retreat is just fifteen years old—maybe twenty years at the most.”

“Then it’s likely that Sidious himself corrupted the wellspring.” Anakin sighed. “Just like the one underneath the Temple on Coruscant.”

“He…he corrupted the Wellspring?” Ahsoka asked in a faint voice. She’d never seen the wellspring beneath her home, but had grown up knowing it was there. The wellspring the Temple sheltered was a blessing from the Force, a sign that the Jedi had always been meant to live on that very spot.

“Ahsoka.” Anakin looked at her, grief, regret, and old bitterness in his eyes. “Thousands of people were murdered there in a single night. That kind of—you can’t expect that a wellspring won’t react to that kind of Darkness. Sidious just finished the job by living there for the next twenty years.”

“When Ben went to Coruscant last year, he said the Imperial Palace—your old Jedi Temple—reeked of death and Darkness,” Jade said quietly. “He could feel it from kilometers away, without even trying to reach for it. And…and I used to live there, in the converted Imperial Palace. The lower in the building you went, the more it felt like you could hear screams, and the harder it was to breathe. I didn’t go down to the lower levels unless I had no choice.”

“We can’t go home.” The words fell from Ahsoka’s lips like mourning stones, and felt hollow to her ears. “The Order can never live there again.”

“If the wellspring can’t be cleansed somehow?” Anakin shook his head. “No. We can’t.”

“Did Obi-Wan have any ideas about where the Order could rebuild?” Rex asked, attempting to find some salvageable light. Ahsoka gripped the hand he offered her, heart clenching with the painful reminder of the loss of her home.

Jade gave them a dry smile. “Not that I know about. He’s been a bit busy making sure that the Lothal have a place to live.”

They proceeded to the base, but it was slow going; the sun was rising and taking away their protective shadows. Wolffe nailed the lone sentry that was stationed on an overhang abutting one of the base’s smaller personnel entrances; Jade flipped down and took out the first half of the pair guarding the doors by snapping his neck. The second was just turning to fire at her when Ahsoka landed on him, sending the trooper face first into the dirt. Rex stunned her downed trooper from the rooftop before jumping down to join them.

“Are you just going to let us do all the work?” Jade asked Anakin.

Anakin had his hand up, fingers curled in a familiar gesture. “Just making sure no one feels the need to pay attention to this side of the building for a while. There’s a lot of turmoil inside. We need to hack into communications and find out what the hell is going on before we rush in.”

“Seriously, I am still not used to you having sensible plans,” Rex said.

Ahsoka pulled the stunned trooper’s helmet and removed its internal comm to listen. “I’m just getting basic stormtrooper chatter, here. We need to know what the ranking officers are saying.”

“I’ll find it.” Jade pulled not the security panel, but a smaller panel lower and to the right of the first.

Ahsoka would never have seen it if Jade hadn’t revealed its existence. “No tools required. Neat.”

“No one thinks to look beyond the obvious,” Jade said, slicing into unidentifiable cabling sections. Ahsoka had done more than her fair share of security panel hacks, but she wouldn’t have known what to do with the uniform gray conduit lines without time and training.

“Why not just use your security codes?” Wolffe asked. “Got to be faster than this.”

“Restoring a captured base from lockdown is one thing.” Jade took the trooper comm from Ahsoka, nodding brief thanks, before she stripped its outer casing and began connecting it to the uncovered wiring. “If no one else here is using gold-level clearance, the Imperials will notice and come to investigate. Besides, this is much more efficient.”

“Taps directly into the hardline for base communications,” Anakin said. “Saves a hell of a lot of time, and as long as we keep our end muted, they won’t notice a thing.”

“I am learning so many neat tricks, and I will gladly sit at your feet and learn all of them,” Wolffe told Jade, who lowered her head and bit her lip to keep from smiling.

“There,” Jade said, and turned up the comm’s speaker so that they could all listen.

“Prison break.” Anakin grinned as the word of escaped prisoners was one of the first things mentioned. Ahsoka listened as the Imps theorized about misdirection, and the strong suspicion that the escapees were still hiding inside the base. “They’ve been off-grid for over twenty hours now. The Adepts must be losing their minds.”

“He must have had help, their security—” Jade began to say, and then they all hushed as word of a traitor was repeated by base command, a male named Vüqar that Ahsoka had never heard of. It could mean that the general was small fish in the military, but given who Retreat was created for, she rather doubted it.

“Commander Naasade.” Anakin frowned. “I don’t know that name.”

Ahsoka smiled; that was a bright spot she hadn’t expected. “But we do.”

“He’s Alliance Intelligence, solo operative, works under Colonel DeSoto,” Wolffe explained after they waited out the next burst of comm chatter. “He goes deep cover in Imp territory a lot. He was long-term Stormtrooper Corps before he jumped ship.”

“We suspect that Naasade is a brother,” Rex added, after they listened to another burst of radio chatter that didn’t tell them anything useful except that grid searches were behind schedule. “If not, then he’s definitely Mandalorian.”

“Naasade,” Anakin murmured. “Nobody. Oh, he did something that he is _not_ fond of.”

“We’ve never met him, but he has a decent rep,” Rex said. “Naasade tends to hide from regular folk. Mouse says that he’s good people, just fucked up from the war.”

“Just like the rest of us,” Anakin said, and then smiled. “Mouse made colonel, huh? Good for her.”

“I’m just grateful that Naasade was in the right place to lend assistance,” Ahsoka said. “I worry about what the Adepts would have done to Obi-Wan if he’d still been in their hands.”

“Nothing good.” Jade looked at Anakin. “Can you sense Ben, Skywalker? I’m not getting anything at all.”

Anakin shook his head. “No, which means he’s hiding. We’ll have to look the hard way, or hope that he finds us first.”

“But those Adepts are _definitely_ looking.” Ahsoka resisted the urge to scrub at her skin again. “I think we’ve been noticed.”

“Good.” Anakin threw back his hood and palmed his lightsaber, but didn’t ignite it. “Once we get inside, Ahsoka and I are going to wander around, presenting the most obvious target, and draw the Adepts to us. That leaves the rest of you free to hunt for Obi-Wan. Questions?”

“Are you safe around the Adepts?” Jade gave Skywalker a fiery glare. “The last thing we need is for you to keel over or turn sleeper agent.”

“Keeling over? Maybe. Turning sleeper agent? No. If they planted any commands, they were meant for Vader, and he’s literally just pieces. There’s not enough of him left to respond to anything like that.” Anakin hesitated. “However, feel free to shoot or stab me if it seems even remotely like it might be otherwise.”

“Fatally?” Wolffe asked, when Ahsoka discovered that she was too distressed to voice the question herself.

Anakin nodded. “If you think everyone is in danger? Do it.”

“Dammit, Skywalker,” Rex growled. “Will you at least _try_ to avoid getting yourself killed?”

“Sure.” Anakin smiled at Rex. “Hey, remember the old joke? ‘Who’s the scariest person in the room?’”

‘“The one-armed man,’” Rex replied, lips curling up in an unwilling smile.

Anakin clapped him on the shoulder. “He got demoted. Now he’s the _second_ scariest person in the room. Buckets up, kids.”

“Kids? We’re older than you are,” Wolffe snorted before pulling his helmet on.

“I’m fifty-five Standard. You guys are thirty-eight,” Skywalker shot back, grinning.

Ahsoka waited until the group had split up inside the base. “Second-scariest, huh?”

“Oh, yeah,” Anakin replied, sounding pleased.

“You mean things like the shadow-walking, being invisible in the Force, and the Force illusions?”

Anakin nodded. “Well, the Force Illusion bit was something he figured out when the war started, but otherwise? Obi-Wan’s been picking up tricks like it’s going out of style.”

“Does he share?” Ahsoka asked, intrigued. “Most of that sounds really useful.”

“Old rules still apply: Bring tea, ask politely, and be prepared to have your ass handed to you while learning it,” Anakin said. “C’mon. Let’s go get him.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

Obi-Wan watched the squad below them, safely hidden by darkness. Half of the troopers were clustered around their malfunctioning life-signs detector, while the others protected them with an outer fan sweep of the area. He glanced over at Cody, who was giving the stormtroopers a look that was sitting somewhere between mockery and supreme irritation.

“Dammit, sir, I can’t fix it here,” the trooper who’d been primary on the device said at last. “We’re going to have to hit Maintenance for the part I need.”

Their sergeant gave vent to a loud sigh. “All right, Corporal. You’re riding center, and I want everyone else on protective detail around the equipment. Move out.”

Obi-Wan waited until the doors had slid shut behind the last trooper before dropping down from the ceiling cross beam. He landed hard on his feet, not quite adjusting in time to pad the landing, and the shock of it went all the way up his knees and into his hips. Cody fared better, since Obi-Wan caught him with the Force and slowed his descent into a painless landing.

“That is a neat trick,” Cody said in a low voice. “That’s three life-signs detectors you’ve broken now. They’re going to get suspicious.”

“They should be suspicious already,” Obi-Wan replied, accepting the water when Cody passed it over. “It’s been how long now?”

“A few hours.” Cody shoved the bottle back into the bag. “It’s 05:30.”

“05:30,” Obi-Wan repeated, and then had a much delayed realization that made him feel thoughtless and utterly ridiculous. “Of what _day?_ ”

Cody snorted. “It’s the 10th.”

“I’ve been off-grid for five days.” Obi-Wan pushed his hair back behind his ears when the long strands tried to fall forward. “Fuck. I hope they don’t think I’m dead.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea,” Cody teased, and then pulled out the datapad. “Adept check.”

Obi-Wan rubbed his eyes, which were already stinging with exhaustion. His shoulder was technically healed from the knife wound, but it _ached_ , like the blade was still jammed in place. His left arm was throbbing in time with his pulse, but it was also half numb from the elbow down, and his fingers wouldn’t lose the pins-and-needles sensation.

Gods, he was tired. Eighteen hours had not been enough rest to recover from what had been done to him—not physically, and definitely not mentally.

Obi-Wan and Cody still had the run of the base’s four lower levels, assisted by so much unfinished construction. He didn’t know what the Imperials were once building, but the debris, left-behind supplies, and unfinished structures made for great hiding places.

Cody’s security pass hadn’t been deactivated—probably in hopes that they would slip up and use it. The first time they’d come to a locked door, Obi-Wan solved the difficulty by grabbing Cody’s hand and pulling them through shadow.

Cody had been less than enthusiastic about stepping through solid durasteel.

“What’s this central tower, here?” Obi-Wan asked, pointing at that part of the schematic. He’d yet to see any part of it flagged by red, orange, or yellow security passes.

“I don’t know,” Cody replied. “Nobody’s allowed inside—not even the Adepts. It’s gold-level access only.”

“And gold-level access is…?”

Cody deactivated the datapad and tucked it back into his belt. “The Emperor.”

Obi-Wan felt a chill crawl up his spine and settle on the back of his neck like a massive, clammy hand. “Ah. No activity at all, right?”

“None, and we’ve been here several days.” Cody looked up at him, eyes narrowing in concern. “You all right?”

“As long as he stays dead, I’m happy,” Obi-Wan murmured. “Hold still, will you? I think I can manage to do this now without botching it.”

Cody made distressed faces while Obi-Wan used the Force to slowly repair the damage Tiritha had done to his nose. “That always fucking tickles.”

“I’m just glad I was able to heal it.” Obi-Wan stepped back while Cody rubbed at his nose, expression brightening when he realized there wasn’t even bruising left behind. “The Force is…strange, right now.”

“Strange how?” Cody asked as they moved out.

“Things that are local to me—like you, or the immediate area around us—that’s fine. Everything feels normal, except for how Dark this place is,” Obi-Wan said, but Dark was probably an understatement. Obi-Wan had never felt anything as oppressive as the atmosphere in this base, and he’d been to fucking Korriban.

“But if I try to reach out further, it’s like…it’s like trying to make out the words on a channel that’s gone to static. Or when a hard rain strikes water, and every drop creates a ripple, but each ripple is colliding with every other ripple until you can’t see those individual waves any longer. It’s just chaos.” The chaotic feeling had lessened in the hours since he’d awoken, but not enough to be useful beyond a certain distance.

“Oh.” Cody looked over his shoulder at him, eyebrow raised. “Kenobi. That was _you._ You made that mess.”

Obi-Wan stopped short in sudden, gut-churning distress. “I did—oh. Oh, no.”

His shields. His shields had collapsed.

He’d been in great pain, his shields had collapsed, and he was one of the loudest broadcasters in the entire Order.

“By all the fucking stars, I may have killed people,” Obi-Wan whispered.

Cody turned around and gave him a patient look. “Yeah, you might have. Hell, I’m pretty sure I came close to dying when that wave crashed down. But even if you did? You aren’t to blame. You are _not_ responsible for that shit. You want to point that guilt in the right direction, you blame those fucking Adepts.”

Obi-Wan nodded in response. He couldn’t do a damned thing about it right now, anyway. “And how good are you at doing the same? Pointing the guilt in the proper direction, I mean.”

Cody shrugged in wry acknowledgement. “I put in a lot of effort at getting blackout-drunk.”

“Ah, rampant alcoholism. I’m familiar with that one,” Obi-Wan said, smiling.

“Oh, yeah?” Cody took point as they resumed their slow walk through a half-lit maintenance tunnel. “When did you have time to devote to that sort of thing?”

“I lived in the middle of nowhere for seventeen, eighteen years. There isn’t much else to do in a desert.” Obi-Wan followed Cody’s lead and ducked beneath a half-hung bundle of cable. “I had to stop keeping alcohol around or I would do my best to drown in it.”

“Fucking Sixty-Six,” Cody muttered.

“Among other things.” Obi-Wan thought about broaching the topic for a good four minutes before finally daring to say it. “Rex thinks you’re dead.”

Cody didn’t reply until they’d gone through the next hatch, making sure it was clear of potential ambush. “I might as well have been. You’ve seen Rex?”

“Rex and Wolffe turned up on Lothal about a day and a half before the battle, along with some friends.”

The connection to the next hatch had shorted out, and the primary release for the door had no power. Cody put his hand into the open panel, pulling out a clump of wire. Obi-Wan worried that they were about to walk into solid rock instead of the tunnel Cody was looking for. They weren’t trapped, not yet, but he didn’t want solid earth at their backs if they were found.

“Tano’s group, right?”

“Ahsoka and the Spectres, yes.” Obi-Wan grabbed the final set of wires and twisted the stripped ends together when Cody wound up fighting with too many leads. “I didn’t know Ahsoka was alive until then. If you’re both Alliance, how do they not know about you?”

“I asked for them not to be told. Command doesn’t like it, but they haven’t said a word.” Cody grinned when the door slid open, revealing a passage that had no working lights at all. “And here’s that connection line. We can get to the other half of the base from here.”

“Excellent.” Obi-Wan waited until Cody had snapped on a glow rod, casting cold white light into the tunnel. “What happened?”

“I was stationed on Kamino for…hell, fifteen years. The few of us that were left in the Corps always got shipped out to the back of beyond, outposts with no strategic value, or just shit assignments. Probably hoping we’d retire, or go AWOL and give them an excuse.”

Cody shined the light on a deactivated maintenance droid, still hanging from the couplings it had been working to connect. “Just my luck the Alliance decided that Kamino was strategically useful to _them_. I took a bad hit during the fight. Probably should have been fatal. It’s how I earned this.” He pointed to the scar on the right side of his face, one that began at his jaw and lurched up over his ear, disappearing into his hair.

“It does look like you attempted a matched set.”

Cody smiled. “Yeah.” They skirted a tall stack of durasteel sheeting that fronted a stretch of wall that was still bare rock. “I went down thinking, ‘At least I get to die at home.’ Most of my brothers couldn’t say that.”

Obi-Wan tried not to flinch. There was so much guilt and pain tangled up together, for both of them. “Someone recognized you.”

“Colonel DeSoto. Hauled my dying ass into an Alliance infirmary to fix the damage, and Alliance standard protocol is to de-chip any surviving clone that gets picked up.”

Cody stopped walking, shining the glow rod down at the floor. The durasteel’s glossy finish bounced the light back up to highlight his features in stark relief. “You think you’re wide awake. You’re not dreaming, and you know exactly what you’re doing. Then you wake up to an actual fucking nightmare. It’s so damned quiet, and you didn’t even realize that something had been shouting in your head for twenty years until it was gone.”

Obi-Wan stared at him, horrified all over again. “The biological shelf-life for active chips was supposed to be one year, two at the most—that’s when the Alliance started picking up deserters from the Imperial military. Yours never deteriorated?”

Cody started moving again; Obi-Wan stayed at his side instead of falling back. “Just fucking lucky, I guess.”

Obi-Wan could put the pieces together far too easily. “Naasade. I thought I’d misheard, at first. You gave up your name.”

“Chip or no chip, I betrayed my family,” Cody said in a quiet voice. “I know the tradition. It’s up to the one you’ve wronged whether you get your name back or not.”

“You were waiting for me,” Obi-Wan murmured. “Gods.”

“And then you had to go and die on the Death Star. I had plenty of time to get used to the idea of being nobody,” Cody said.

“Then I’m very surprised you haven’t yet asked me about my cheating death.”

Cody smiled. “I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. Besides, I think I’ve answered enough awkward questions for a while. What’s with this Venge shit, anyway?”

“Oh, that.” Obi-Wan smiled back. “I tried to assassinate an Emperor about two and a half years after Sixty-Six.”

“Yeah?” Cody treated him to a raised eyebrow, the expression that had always revealed his opinion about Obi-Wan’s current level of insanity. “How did that go?”

“Not so well.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

They made it about an eighth of a klik into the base before finding their first stormtrooper squad. Wolffe nailed the first four on pure reflex, while Mara shot the final two with a holdout blaster before Rex could turn around from guarding their backs. Jade seemed a hell of a lot more pragmatic about shooting Imperials, but maybe there was some difference between Lothal Imps and Byss Imps that Wolffe just wasn’t picking up on.

“Now who the hell am I going to shoot?” Rex asked, eying the pile of white-armored bodies.

“Not like there won’t be plenty more where those came from.” Wolffe grinned at his brother. “Don’t be so damned slow next time.”

“Let’s go.” Jade stopped only long enough to strip power packs from Imp blasters and stuff them into her pockets. “There will be four more squads along to check on this one in the next forty seconds.”

“Access hatch, ten meters left,” Rex said. Jade nodded and took lead again with her blaster, keeping her lightsaber in reserve. Rex was back at their tail, twin blaster pistols raised and ready. Wolffe had elected for pure damned firepower, and held blaster rifles in each hand while scanning for danger at every corridor junction they passed.

They got through the hatch and halfway down the next corridor before a new problem presented itself. “Adept,” Jade hissed, pulling her lightsaber from her belt and igniting the violet blade.

“Fucking hells.” Rex walked up to stand at Wolffe’s shoulder. “Guess they didn’t want to concentrate on Skywalker and Tano, after all.”

“It’s just one of them, at least.” Wolffe stared at the Adept, whose blood-red and glowing amber gaze was flickering around to take in each of them in turn. He was the size of a damned battle tank, but size didn’t matter to a well-aimed blaster shot.

Wolffe and Rex must have had the realization in the same moment. All four of their weapons came up, gaining a bead on their lone Adept guest. “Jade, call it.”

“He’s got a lightsaber,” Jade replied, giving the Adept a cold stare. “The moment you fire, he’s going to be deflecting blasts right back to you.”

“We’ve got armor,” Wolffe said, unconcerned.

“With joints,” Rex muttered under his breath. “Let’s not tempt this fucker’s aim, all right?”

Jade holstered her blaster. “This lovely specimen drove a vibroblade through my teacher’s hand. He’s mine.” Then, silently, she continued: _Stick with the plan. The Adepts are after Skywalker, Tano, and now I have my own to play with. Take the lift down and look for Kenobi and that Alliance agent._

Wolffe’s face scrunched up on one side as he tried not to let on how damned crawly telepathy still felt to him. _I’m not supposed to leave you, and I definitely don’t want to leave you on your own with a damned Adept. Rex?_

Rex was frowning. “Wolffe, cover her back, but keep your distance from the lightsabers. I’ll find a different way around and provide support from the other side.”

 _Nice cover,_ Jade replied approvingly. _Go find him._ Out loud, she said, “I wonder if you can actually move fast enough to keep up with me.”

The Adept grunted and smiled wide, revealing rotten teeth and a disturbing lack of tongue. His only real answer was to ignite a red lightsaber and swing it around the corridor in a tight arc.

“Fuck me,” Wolffe said in resignation, and could only watch as both lightsabers crossed, hissing and throwing sparks.

 

*          *          *          *

 

Rex went down a level, opened the lift doors, and found himself face-to-face with another squad of Imps. “Hi, there,” he said, and shot the first two before anyone could raise a rifle. Then he slammed his hand on the door-close, sealing the squad off from retaliation. “Let’s go down another level or two.”

That put him on the bottom level of the base, if the low-quality map on the turbolift screen was accurate. This time when Rex opened the doors, it was to an empty corridor. The lights were at half-power, some of them giving desultory flickers. Four meters to his left, the corridor ended in solid wall. He stepped out, facing the right, both blasters raised. The tunnel stretched on into darkness, a mess of unfinished construction, hanging wires, and propped-open side doors. Even without the concern of tunnel junctions, there was plenty of cover for incoming Imp squads…or for escaped prisoners.

 _Check your targets,_ Rex told himself, and began taking slow, careful steps that wouldn’t echo and alert possible enemies. The tunnel was otherwise almost dead silent. The air quality was good, but he couldn’t hear any fans keeping the mix going. There were no sounds from above, no comms clicking on and off—the only thing he heard was the faint buzz from power conduit lines.

He reached the first junction without incident. He lowered his arms and gave himself a moment to breathe. He’d worked solo quite a bit over the past two decades, but gods, he never liked it. He always wanted someone at his back, another pair of eyes alert for trouble.

Rex missed the 501st, but the grief was never as sharp as when he stood alone.

He made it past the second junction, but by the time he was halfway to the third, he heard it. A single footstep, a scuff of a boot against metal.

He froze in place, listening. There: He could hear the soft, quiet steps of someone approaching, trying as he was to make no sound. One person alone.

 _Shit._ Rex crept forward, hoping that the lights would stay on. It was a hell of a lot darker beyond that third junction. His possible target was coming out of the right-side tunnel, which put a corner between them until one of them dared to leave cover.

Rex debated on it for at least six seconds before gritting his teeth and stepping fully into the junction, both weapons raised. His target had the same idea at the same moment; Rex almost got a face full of someone else’s blasters, but fingers jerked back from triggers at the last possible moment.

They stared at each other in mute shock. Rex was glad to see he was not the only one breathing hard at the near-miss. Naasade was definitely a brother, something Rex would know despite the scars on both sides of the man’s face. Gray hair, though. Damned genetic quirks.

Rex was trying to convince himself to stop pointing his weapons at a friendly when Naasade beat him to it—he raised both blasters into the air, fingers firmly away from the triggers. _“N’eparavu takisit, burc’ya,”_ Naasade said in gruff apology. _“Ni naasa Imperial. Shi slanari dayn be te prudii.”_

It wasn’t the Alliance verbal confirmation code that did it. It was his voice, the inflection in his Mando’a that was never quite right, even if it was functionally correct.

“Leaving the shadow is what we should all be doing,” Rex said, giving the proper response. Then he drew a deep breath, yanked his helmet, and threw it at Naasade. “YOU COMPLETE FUCKING BASTARD!”

The man ducked the helmet before staring at Rex, wide-eyed. “What are you—” he tried to say, but then Rex threw his arms around his brother and held on tightly. Armor against civvies—his brother was going to have _beskar’gam_ -granted bruises come morning.

There was a long, shocked pause before Cody whispered, “Rex?”

“You incredible bastard,” Rex hissed, feeling Cody’s arms hesitantly settle into place over his shoulders and along his back. “You absolute fucker.”

“No, please.” Cody’s voice turned shy and pleased. “Tell me how you really feel.”

“Where the absolute hell have you been, how did you survive, and _I am going to shoot Mouse for not telling me!_ ” Rex shouted.

Cody snickered. “Thought it was me you wanted to shoot?”

Rex shook his head, finally willing to step back. “Not anymore, asshole.”

“Yeah.” Cody was smiling, but it was a terrible expression that looked a lot closer to grief than happiness. “Fucking bastard. I missed you, too.”

“Naasade.” Rex rolled his eyes. “Gods-all, I should have fucking well known. You’re going to tell me about Kamino, and all about that matched set of scars you tried to go for.”

“Can it wait until we get the hell out of here?” Cody asked. He managed to put away whatever was bothering him, his more familiar smirk settling into place.

Rex squashed down a hell of a lot of excitement, anger, and elation. Time for all that later. “Yeah, it can and it will, so you’re not allowed to die on me to get out of an explanation. We heard about the prison break. Have you got Kenobi?”

“Back this way.” Cody jerked his head towards the side tunnel. “Come on.” Rex nodded and followed him after snagging his helmet, keeping one eye forward while listening for any hint of pursuit. “I find it hard to believe Mouse would just send one of you.”

Rex frowned. “Mouse didn’t send us. We were on Lothal when this shit went down. We came on our own.”

“Huh.” Cody glanced back at him, eyes narrowed. “Who’s with you, then?”

“Wolffe and Tano. A new Padawan named Jade, you’ll like her. Pretty sure Wolffe’s trying to adopt. And…Skywalker.”

“Who, the kid? What’s he doing out here?” Cody asked.

Rex couldn’t resist. “No, the _other_ Skywalker.”

Cody stopped short, turned around, and stared at him. “You mean we’re right back to dealing with both of those crazy assholes?”

Rex smiled. “Yeah. Seems that way.”

Cody’s answering grin was bright, and maybe a bit manic. “Oh, this is going to be a good day.”

Cody’s grin vanished when they stepped into a side room and found it empty. “Of all the—” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Twenty-six years later, and that man still doesn’t know how to fucking stay put.”

Rex had to bite back a grin. “Sounds about right, honestly.”

Cody shook his head and raised his voice. “Where the hell are you?”

The response was swift, at least. Obi-Wan’s voice was a faint echo that bounced along the corridor. “Fifteen meters down, door on your left.”

They found the door easily enough, which was spilling bright green light out into the tunnel. “Didn’t see that before,” Cody muttered.

“The door wasn’t open.” Obi-Wan was standing the edge of a viewing platform, hands resting on Imperial gray railing. His hair was unbound, and his clothes had gone from smuggler’s civvies to the basic blacks worn under a stormtrooper’s armor. His left arm was bandage-wrapped, but otherwise he seemed to be standing upright on his own.

Then Rex realized what Obi-Wan was looking at, and his mouth fell open. “Is that…?”

“Yes.” Obi-Wan’s answer was a harsh note against a backdrop of humming machinery that should _not_ be _._

“Dear weeping gods.” Cody wrapped his left hand around the rail in a white-knuckled grip. Rex stood between them, staring down at the massive room and everything it contained.

There were at least three banks of six cloning tanks on the right side of the room. The left side held another four banks of three, and there was a single line of five tanks fronting the room. Every single tank was occupied by a humanoid shape, most of them grown to adulthood. Medical droids were monitoring the tanks, milling about, or making reference notes in a central display that was emitting a holographic representation of vitals for each clone in the room.

It should have felt familiar. It should have reminded Rex of home. Instead, it just felt _wrong._ “What the hell is this?” Rex grated out.

“They have no spark.” Obi-Wan’s voice was flat with anger. “None of them do.”

“You mean…they’re not people.” Cody swallowed; his skin was turning almost the same color as his hair.

“Biologically? Certainly.” Obi-Wan sighed. “But they have no spirit. They’re empty shells.”

“Fucking meat clankers,” Rex whispered, appalled. “Actual meat clankers.”

“Some of them are, yes, judging by those bio readings.” Obi-Wan lifted his hand and rubbed at his temple. “The others are meant to be hosts.”

“Are you all right?” Rex asked him. Obi-Wan’s hand had been shaking, but that wasn’t what had captured Rex’s attention.

Obi-Wan seemed to think about it. “No. Not at all.”

“I figured. Your eyes are doing that shining gold bit, again.”

“Sorry.” Obi-Wan rubbed at his face again, this time with both hands. “I’m tired, and extremely upset, and it’s…not so easy to control right now.”

“It’s fine,” Rex said, because it was. Obi-Wan had always been the Jedi on the field that Rex trusted to still know friend from foe, even if he’d utterly lost his shit by his Order’s standards.

Cody glanced over at Obi-Wan. “That’s different. What’s got you so spooked?”

“I’ll show you,” Obi-Wan said, and led the way to a ladder on the far side of the platform.

Obi-Wan slid down the sides of the ladder, skipping the rungs. Rex shook his head and did the same, wincing a bit when he hit the floor a little too hard for his knees’ liking. Cody was right behind him, landing and looking around the room with a scowl on his face. The droids, after giving them a cursory glance, continued to ignore them.

Rex reached out and steadied Obi-Wan before he could fall over. “Upright is good.”

To his surprise, Obi-Wan grabbed his hand, using it to pull Rex into a hug. Rex sighed; there was a slight, tell-tale tremor beneath his hands. No, his General wasn’t doing well, but he’d always been a stubborn bastard. “It’s going to be fine, I promise.”

Obi-Wan pulled back without answering, staring at Rex. Without the shock of his first introduction, Rex thought that the golden shine to his eyes was gorgeous, even if Obi-Wan didn’t know what was causing it.

Rex smiled. “Not the way you thought things were going to go five days ago, right?”

Obi-Wan nodded, a hint of amusement on his face. “No, not at all. Who’s with you?”

“Wolffe, Ahsoka, Jade.” Rex waited a beat. “Skywalker.”

The amusement drained away, replaced by shock. “Anakin. I didn’t—I didn’t hallucinate that?”

Rex bit back a curse. He hadn’t realized that was going to be an issue, or he would have been a hell of a lot nicer about it. “No, you didn’t, but he’s fine.”

Obi-Wan gave him a long, searching look. “All right. This way,” he said, and led the way to the single bank of cloning tanks along the wall.

Rex glanced at Cody. They hadn’t communicated by expression and gesture in a long damned time, but it was worth a shot. _The hell is going on?_

Cody shook his head. _Battle breakdown._

Shit. _Bad?_

Cody held up his hand and tilted it back and forth. Rex grimaced and decided he was going to be paying a hell of a lot more attention to their crazy Jedi.

The realization almost drew him up short, but he was too damned professional for that. Fucking hells. Rex was following along after their General with Cody at his side. He never thought he’d have that chance again.

Obi-Wan crossed his arms and stood in front of the tanks, but kept his head down. “That’s him. These are clones of the Emperor.”

Rex felt the spit in his mouth evaporate. No wonder Obi-Wan was upset. That bastard coming back from the dead was the absolute last thing the galaxy needed.

“Huh. Never was much to look at, was he?” Cody asked.

“Body-jumping,” Rex muttered. “Hells. I guess these are what you meant by hosts.”

“Right. There’s nothing to shove aside if one were to decide to hop in and take over.” Obi-Wan’s jaw clenched. “I had a bad moment of panic, trying to figure out if he was really here.”

“He’s not, is he? I mean, aside from this mess,” Rex said, studying the clones and their expressionless, unlined faces. Cody was right; the Emperor had never been all that pleasant on the eyes.

“No.” Obi-Wan lifted his head. The gold had faded again, but with it gone, Obi-Wan’s gaze just looked too damned empty and broken. “No, I think he’s actually dead.”

Cody was studying the cloning tanks as if he really wanted to blow them the hell up. “Is this how that Maul fuck kept coming back?”

“Maybe. Originally I didn’t think so, given the bionic lower half of his body, but Sidious…Sidious wouldn’t have been above taking Maul’s legs a second time as punishment for failure.”

Rex glanced over at Obi-Wan, who was staring at the nearest copy of the Emperor with something that looked far too close to terrified fascination. He wasn’t the smartest clone the Kaminoans had ever decanted, but he could put two and two together. “What did he do to you?”

“There’s an alphabetical list,” Obi-Wan said, a joke that immediately fell flat. “I—I tried to kill him, two years after Mustafar. The problem with trying to assassinate someone, though, the mindset you have to be in…”

“You were Fallen.” Cody didn’t look surprised.

“And didn’t even know it.” Obi-Wan’s grip on his arms tightened. “There is…there’s a difference between being Fallen, and being—”

 _Sith,_ Rex heard, feeling chilled. “Full-fledged, huh?” Obi-Wan gave a jerking nod. “I just can’t see you doing that,” he said, trying to pretend that his stomach and his heart hadn’t just turned inside out and swapped places.

“I can,” Cody said, to Rex’s surprise. “You and I both know our General can be a ruthless bastard. I just don’t think the Emperor got what _he_ wanted out of it.”

Obi-Wan tore his gaze away from the cloning tanks. “No, not really. There is also a difference between being Dark, and being _evil._ Sidious has never cared for anyone aside from himself, and I…”

Oh. Rex got it, and it warmed his heart even as he felt like an idiot for doubting. “You care about everyone. Always have.”

Obi-Wan’s smile was sad, self-deprecating acknowledgement. “It’s something to hold onto when everything else is dust.”

“How did you get away from that bastard?” Cody asked. “I always heard he didn’t take rejection well.”

Obi-Wan glanced at his left arm. “It took three suicide attempts. The last one either convinced him that I was dead, or that I wasn’t worth the trouble to hunt down.”

Rex glared at him. Between Obi-Wan and Skywalker… “You don’t pull any fucking punches, do you?”

“I always did hold the opinion that if you’re going to do something, do it well,” Obi-Wan said wryly.

“They never had a chance.” Cody had a half-feral smile on his face. “What the Adepts wanted from you—it wouldn’t have worked.”

“Oh, once upon a time, it might have.” Obi-Wan seemed to be contemplating the idea. “But after Sidious, the Well, and especially after Fire? They didn’t have a chance in hell.”

Rex had no idea what the Well was supposed to be—he could all but hear the capital letter—and he didn’t think Obi-Wan meant the same fire-based torture the Adepts had just put him through. Fire had been another capital-letter word, too.

“Well, we’ve got allies on-base now.” Cody looked at Obi-Wan and Rex. “Ready to start cleaning house?”

Obi-Wan turned away from the tanks. “I think that’s an excellent idea. Let’s gather everyone together, please. I want to kill the last two Adepts, blow up these fucking tanks, and leave this damned planet.”

“All right, then.” Cody gave Rex that familiar damned smirk of his. “You heard the General.”

Rex nodded, realizing there was a wide grin on his face. “Explosions and mayhem. I believe we can handle that, sir.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

“Is it one Adept, two of them, or all three?” Ahsoka asked, after they’d finished decimating two squads of stormtroopers. She regretted their deaths, but these men were so loyal to the Empire that the air had been all but swimming in fanaticism. Those were not the sort of soldiers that could be talked down.

“Dunno.” Anakin stole the lone officer’s comm and listened to the chatter. “No one’s been captured, but the Imperials are definitely starting to notice the body count.” He dropped the comm and stood, glancing around. “There is definitely an Adept…that way,” he said, pointing down and towards the south. “And Mara. She’s got that one.”

“So we might have the other two.” Ahsoka followed Anakin when he began walking. Either of them could lead and be comfortable with it, but she could tell Anakin had at least a subconscious memory of the base’s layout. He never hesitated in choosing his path, despite the near-maze of identical passageways and junctions.

“We can handle them. Or at the very least, we can definitely keep them busy until the others get back.”

Ahsoka nodded. She was not worried about the Adepts, even though she should have been. There had just been too many close calls with actual Sith early in her career. The Adepts didn’t rate much more than a slightly elevated heartbeat.

“Is this weird for you?” she asked instead. “I mean—we’ve only been doing this for about fifteen minutes, and it still feels like…”

“Exactly like it used to?” Anakin glanced back at her, smiling. “Well, I’m sure that my magical resurrection is probably helping that feeling.”

Ahsoka inclined her head in acknowledgement, fighting her own smile. “A bit, Skyguy.”

Anakin’s head whirled back around, and his lightsaber came up. Ahsoka obeyed instinct and the quiet command, freezing in place. “Head’s up, Spy-Girl,” he whispered. “We’re about to find out which Adept we drew.”

“Understood,” she murmured, and followed him into an open area. A private hangar, she surmised, based on the lone, half-disassembled shuttle parked on the far end. The external doors were sealed, but there were several hallways branching off in different directions if they needed a quick escape.

There was only one Adept, a stick-thin, tall, dark-skinned humanoid dressed in form-fitting black. His eyes were like those of the two Adepts captured by the Lothal Academy Garrison’s security recordings—glowing blood red, accented by yellow amber. He stood alone, without even a single stormtrooper to guard his back.

Ahsoka’s grip on her lightsabers tightened. A man who felt no need for assistance was a man to be wary of.

The Adept and Anakin were staring at each other. The Adept was smiling; Anakin just looked as if he was desperately trying to remember something.

“I know you,” Anakin said at last.

“That you do,” the Adept replied, granting them a mocking partial bow.

“Your voice.” Anakin snapped his fingers as recognition struck. “Tamoeth.”

The Adept smiled. “Vader.”

“No, sorry. He’s no longer available.” Anakin glanced at Ahsoka. _If I say to run, you run. No questions._

Ahsoka glowered at him. _And leave you alone with the Adept? Absolutely not._

“Is he not?” Tamoeth asked, amused by the declaration. Then he spoke a single word, something guttural with far too many consonants.

Ahsoka was about to ask for a translation when Anakin dropped his lightsaber and sank to his knees, clutching his head with both hands.

“Anakin!” Ahsoka returned one of her lightsabers to her belt and knelt at his side.

 _Go!_ It was a frantic, muted cry.

Ahsoka shook her head. _No._ Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest move, but she couldn’t leave him. Anakin had never left her behind, never given up on her. She wouldn’t regret her actions unless he actually tried to kill her.

“Hey, c’mon, Skyguy,” she said, grasping his left arm. “What’s wrong?”

“I am reminding him of his proper place.” Tamoeth smiled in a way that made the corrupt light in his eyes burn brighter. “Is that not correct, Lord Vader? _Vakû thon ehlieoth vassû nah!”_

Anakin shrieked, curling into a fetal ball. His hands were yanking at his hair, white-knuckled and on the verge of stripping his own hair from his head.

“Stop it!” Ahsoka ordered, her blood running cold at the sight of her old Master so easily felled.

Tamoeth gave her a dismissive look. “I have no interest in stopping.”

 _We’ll see._ Ahsoka squeezed Anakin’s shoulder in reassurance that he might not be aware of before standing up. “You’ll stop once I’ve removed your head from your shoulders.”

Tamoeth shook his head, making a tsk-ing noise. “You are an unobservant fool if you believe that your lightsabers are enough to stop me.”

“My lightsabers worked very well on a Sith Apprentice,” Ahsoka retorted, retrieving her second blade and igniting it once more.

“White lightsabers.” Tamoeth smiled. “That is a very interesting choice for one who abandoned her own Order.”

“Oh, that old by-line.” Ahsoka raised her blades into opening position, not of classic Jar’Kai, but a variant she’d learned through trial, error, and evolution of her own fighting style over the years. “Who says I left the Order? Now: Stop hurting him, or you’ll find out why I was the Padawan who could keep up with Anakin Skywalker.”

“I will not,” Tamoeth said, just before he lurched back several steps.

“You will,” Obi-Wan growled, striding out from the hallway to Ahsoka’s left. Rex was just behind him, as was…

Ahsoka lowered her lightsabers in surprise. “Cody?” The man was older, with scars gracing both sides of his head. He was wearing a leather coat and dark trousers, and his hair was durasteel gray instead of white, but she knew that face.

Cody gave her a brief glance. “Tano.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” she asked tartly.

Cody smiled at her, the insufferable bastard. “Aren’t you?”

Whatever Obi-Wan had done, it stopped the Adept. Anakin let out a choked sob and took several deep, gasping breaths before he started swearing in Huttese.

“Are you all right?” Ahsoka asked him in a low voice, while Obi-Wan and Tamoeth stared at each other. Obi-Wan didn’t seem to be badly hurt, but the expression on his face was one she had only ever seen him direct at Darth Maul.

“Help me up,” Anakin whispered. Ahsoka grabbed his arm and pulled Anakin to his feet, though he had a bad moment when Ahsoka feared he was going to collapse again.

“Everyone, meet Tamoeth,” Obi-Wan said. His tone was pleasant, but it was also mindful of the way he’d spoken when they were about to be overrun by Sep droids.

“Yeah.” Anakin coughed a few times before wiping a trickle of bright red blood away from his nose. “We’ve met.”

Obi-Wan glanced at Anakin in concern. “I was hoping you didn’t remember that.”

“I didn’t.” Anakin wiped at his nose again, cursing under his breath. “One of the Adepts left a lightsaber behind. I touched it, and…”

“Trigger object.” Obi-Wan looked grieved. “I’m sorry.”

Anakin shook his head, a tight smile on his face. “Not as sorry as _he’s_ going to be.”

Cody’s lip curled up on one side in his old, characteristic smirk. “Is there a reason we’re not just shooting this fuck?”

Obi-Wan’s gaze slid back to the Adept, who didn’t seem alarmed by the fact that he was vastly outnumbered. “It wouldn’t do any good. Tamoeth is already dead.”

“Well, he’s damned well going to be—oh.” Rex sounded disturbed, even with his helmet’s electric filter. “You mean actually dead.”

Ahsoka’s stomach twisted into an uncomfortable knot. “Didn’t something like that happen to Master Kuro? I remember hearing rumors during the war…”

“Not quite,” Obi-Wan said, as Tamoeth turned his head to look at her. “Master Kuro was suffering from a Nightsister curse, a Living Death. That, dear Ahsoka, is nothing more than animated taxidermy.”

Anakin summed up her feelings on the matter nicely. “Fucking gross.”

“They can _do_ that?” Rex asked. Obi-Wan nodded in response. “That’s almost worse than the body-jumping.”

Ahsoka frowned. Tamoeth’s displeasing condition was stirring up a memory, a connection to something in the past, but she couldn’t quite place it.

Tamoeth was still gazing at her in rapt fascination. “You have been corrupted once before.” The words were a sibilant hiss, an expression of utmost pleasure. “I can see the old patterns within you.”

“What? Don’t be ridiculous—”

Her protest was swallowed up by pain. It was a sudden burning in her veins, a flood of ice and heat that made her feel nauseous and light-headed.

“Ahsoka!” Anakin had to have been yelling, but it was muted and distant, like it wasn’t important compared to the bitter upwelling of set-aside fear and uncultivated resentment—

Ahsoka gasped, her head suddenly clear, the fire and ice gone from her body. Anakin was holding her upright, looking panicked. “What—”

“You’re okay,” Anakin said, swift reassurance. He was telling the truth, but she knew that a moment ago, she had not been. “All right?”

Ahsoka nodded, blinking her eyes to try and clear her head. Then she noticed what had happened to the Adept, and drew in a short, shocked breath. Tamoeth was hanging in the air, a snarl frozen on his face as he glared at his captor.

Obi-Wan’s right arm was outstretched, fingers curled. Ahsoka had never seen such a look of absolute fury on his face…and his eyes were pale gold.

It would have been a beautiful color, stronger than the bleached-out silver, but the wrongness of it made her heart race. Gold was not Sith amber, not anything like the Adepts or the Inquisitors, but it _did not fit._

“That,” Obi-Wan ground out, “is quite enough of that.”

“Obi-Wan,” Ahsoka whispered. She was clinging to Anakin’s arm with all of her strength, but couldn’t make herself relax her grip.

Obi-Wan glanced at her, but when their eyes met, his gaze was not furious, or cold. Instead, he just seemed sad.

“Hey. It’s okay,” Anakin told her in a low voice, just before placing his right hand on top of hers. The metal was warm, but the texture was jarring enough to make her stare up at him in surprise.

Anakin smiled, a warm, gentle expression that she couldn’t recall ever seeing before. “Just feel, Ahsoka. What do you sense?”

Past her panic, past gut instinct that had been trained into her since early childhood, Ahsoka could sense grim determination. A desire to end the threat. Deep concern for those around him.

The Adept, meanwhile, was angered by his imprisonment but not frightened. If anything, he was…pleased.

It was such a sharp contrast, one that should have been obvious from the first moment. Obi-Wan was not Dark, not like Vader, Tamoeth, or the rest of Sidious’s minions. There was too much Light at the core of him, a brilliance that was entwined by shining threads of silver.

Either Obi-Wan’s control slipped, or the Adept had been biding his time. Tamoeth’s mental voice was a sour note in her thoughts. _Freezing my words in my throat will not keep me from speaking. It will not keep your precious ones safe._

“Shooting you might not make you any more dead, but it’ll sure as hell make me feel a _lot_ better,” Rex growled, before looking at Ahsoka. “Are you all right? Both of you?”

“Sure,” Anakin said.

“What did he do to me?” Ahsoka asked.

Anakin’s expression was an odd mix of embarrassment and regret. “Let’s just say that we all should have discussed Mortis a hell of a lot more than we did. Granted, we were glad you didn’t actually remember some of it.”

“Tell me when we’re away from here,” Ahsoka ordered, trying not to feel like a hypocrite. She imagined there were things about Mortis that Anakin still didn’t recall, either, and she was in no hurry to enlighten him.

Then Ahsoka realized what must have happened to her, what the Son must have done, and had to repress a full-body shiver.

Obi-Wan was regarding the floating Adept with a dispassionate look that was somehow more frightening than the rage. “If you become aware of objects on a molecular level, it becomes so much easier to change them, to build them up or tear them down. At that point, there are not a lot of limits to what you can do. I’ve always promised myself that I would never use that talent on a living creature.

“Fortunately, you’re not alive.”

Rex swore viciously in Mando’a; Ahsoka felt her eyes widen as the Adept began to literally dissolve, feet first. Cody gave the accumulating pile of dead Adept…stuff…a disgusted look, but didn’t comment.

“Always a loophole,” Anakin said in a soft voice. “Damn, Master.”

“Do you remember what I said to you at the beginning?” Obi-Wan asked Tamoeth. “Do you remember when I said that if you succeeded, I would kill you?”

Tamoeth still had the ability to speak, even if everything below his waist was now missing. “I remember, Lord Venge.”

Obi-Wan didn’t refute the name, which was not reassuring in the slightest. Instead, he gave the Adept a bright-eyed smile. “I lied.”

Ahsoka flinched when the Adept finished dissolving all at once. _Merciful,_ she thought wildly, considering that Tamoeth didn’t seem to lack the ability to feel. There was a thunk of something hitting the floor, probably clothing or—

Ahsoka swallowed back bile and looked at Obi-Wan in dismay. “You left his _head?_ ”

Cody looked intrigued. “Can we put it on a pole?”

“You are a hell of a lot more vindictive than you used to be,” Rex said. “Even if it is a nice idea.”

Cody shrugged. “Twenty-six years of self-loathing. Makes you bitter.”

Tamoeth was glaring up at Obi-Wan in mute fury. “Sidious attached Tamoeth’s spirit to this one central point. That’s convenient,” Obi-Wan said.

The recognition was like an electric shock as she finally made the connection. “Master Luminara,” Ahsoka breathed. “That’s why Kanan could sense her presence in the Spire. They did that to her, too.”

“Tamoeth did say that Sidious perfected the technique on deceased Jedi.” There was a brief flash of rage in Obi-Wan’s eyes that made the gold shine. Ahsoka bit her lip, unsettled, but again—not Sith amber. Not Dark.

Obi-Wan looked at Anakin. “Do you remember what I told you about bulldozing your way through things?”

Anakin seemed confused; then his face lit up in a broad grin. “Oh!” He reached out with his right hand and clenched it into a tight fist.

Ahsoka was _not_ ashamed of the startled sound that escaped her throat when the floor between Obi-Wan and Anakin suddenly opened up with an ear-splitting roar.

It took a few moments for the dust to settle. When it did, Ahsoka witnessed Obi-Wan treating the Adept to the same jaunty, two-fingered wave he’d introduced himself by on Lothal. Then he kicked the Adept’s head into the gaping hole.

“Twenty meters?” Cody guessed, when the head struck ground a couple of seconds later.

Anakin grinned again. “Sounds about right,” he said, and waved his hand. Ahsoka was more or less prepared when the chasm yanked itself closed like someone zipping up a jacket. “I even left him a little breathing room.”

“That isn’t funny,” Ahsoka whispered, appalled to realize she was smiling.

“Yes, it is,” Anakin countered. “That was a hell of a lot more satisfying than just killing him.”

“How long is that asshole going to last down there?” Rex asked.

“There’s a preservation spell attached to him.” Obi-Wan rubbed at his forehead. “Unless someone digs him up, Tamoeth will be down there until the solar death of this star system.”

Ahsoka felt her smile die. “That could be a very long time.”

Obi-Wan snorted derisively. “And I hope he enjoys every single minute of it,” he said, before looking at Anakin. “Where the _hell_ have you been?”

Anakin lifted his arms in an expansive shrug. “Stranded in Chiss space,” he said, before walking over to Obi-Wan. Ahsoka followed, but made a point of skirting the pile of Adept dust. Cody and Rex, she was amused to note, were doing the same.

Anakin pointed at Obi-Wan. “What happened there?”

Obi-Wan raised his left arm to reveal the line of bandage. “Oh, that. I had a desperate, driving need to stab someone in the face.”

Cody sputtered out a laugh. “And I still appreciate it, thanks.”

“Then we’re down to one Adept.” Those were much more favorable odds.

“Zero Adepts, if Jade got the last one,” Rex said.

“Chiss space.” Obi-Wan frowned. “Mitth’raw’nuruodo.”

“Yeah. You know, I went to an awful lot of trouble, convincing him not to start another war.” Anakin gave Obi-Wan a chiding look. “Then I get back out into Rim territory and find out that _you_ started one.”

Ahsoka realized she was holding her breath. Anakin and Obi-Wan were staring at each other, and she honestly didn’t know if she was about to witness a joyous reunion or a fight. Sometimes they had even managed both at the same time.

Obi-Wan kept a straight face longer, but they both burst out laughing at the same moment. Anakin wrapped around his Master in a hug that held none of his old discomfort when it came to displays of physical affection.

In the Force, it was like two interconnecting parts had finally clicked into solid alignment.

“Why are you still tall?” Obi-Wan asked, his voice muffled by Anakin’s cloak.

“I have no idea,” Anakin answered. “I’ve just been rolling with it. It’s been a weird couple of years.” Anakin put his hands on Obi-Wan’s shoulders and stepped back. “Let me see.”

Obi-Wan narrowed his eyes, but he held out both arms. “It’s not that bad.”

“You are such a liar,” Anakin replied, gently peeling back the edge of Obi-Wan’s right sleeve. Ahsoka felt a rush of nausea when she saw the reddened skin and the two filaments of wiring. “Does it hurt?”

“Not on that side.” Obi-Wan grimaced. “It itches, and it’s _really_ distressing to look at, so can we just—”

“Sure.” Anakin pulled the sleeve back down to cover the wires. “How’s the left arm?”

“I will not be holding a lightsaber in that hand any time soon,” Obi-Wan admitted. “Nerve damage.”

“Then I guess you’ll just need to pick one out of the four,” Anakin said.

Obi-Wan’s brow furrowed. “Four.” Then the expression cleared, replaced by something akin to wonder. “He kept it.”

Anakin’s smile was awkward and endearing. “Yeah. I didn’t remember that before, or I would have mentioned it years ago.” He reached into his cloak and pulled out Obi-Wan’s lightsaber, the one Ahsoka had known so well during the war.

Obi-Wan held the lightsaber in his right hand, running his thumb along the hilt but not activating it. “I honestly have no idea what to think about this.” He looked up at Anakin, a bemused smile on his face. “What am I supposed to do with four lightsabers?”

Anakin didn’t seem worried. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

Rex removed his helmet and wiped his eyes with one hand. “Rex? What’s wrong?” Ahsoka asked, sudden worry grasping her heart in icy fingers.

“Tano. Ahsoka.” Rex smiled, his eyes over-bright and glistening. “It’s us. All of us, standing on the same damned ground. Do you remember the last time the five of us were all in the same place?”

Ahsoka looked around, biting her lip. They were standing in a loose semi-circle, five individuals that had seen the rise of war and fought in the twilight of the Republic: Anakin looked like someone had just punched him in the gut; Obi-Wan’s lips were pressed together in a thin line. Cody was dry-eyed, but there was a grim set to his mouth and grief in his eyes; Rex would look like his heart was breaking if not for the smile on his face.

“Kiros,” Obi-Wan said in a soft voice. “The Battle of Kiros. Right before Zygerria.”

“Twenty-seven years.” Anakin blew out a long sigh. “It doesn’t seem like it should have been that long ago. Sixty-Six wasn’t for another year and a half.”

“Two of us, three of us—four of us, yeah. We were together often,” Rex said. “But all five of us? Never again. I don’t think Kiros would have happened, either, but it was too soon after the Citadel.”

“Tarkin,” Cody spat, saying the Grand Moff’s name like the foul word it should have been.

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Obi-Wan said.

Ahsoka finally let herself feel it, a warm glow of joy that she had not often experienced since the formation of the Empire. “But we’re here. We’re here, now.”

“Yeah.” Rex chuckled and shook his head. “Am I the only one of us who hasn’t died or otherwise faked their death?”

“Sorry, no. You were clinically dead for at least four minutes on Tarabba,” Anakin said.

Rex stared at him. “What.”

“Oh, shit.” Anakin covered his face with both hands while Cody and Obi-Wan both glared at him. “Right. We didn’t tell you.”

“Four fucking _minutes?_ ”

Ahsoka clasped her hand over her mouth, because otherwise she was going to burst out in a fit of giggles. It wasn’t funny. It was not. No.

Cody sighed and gave him a fond look. “Idiot. You were in really bad shape. None of us wanted you to get any bright ideas about death actually being an option.”

“Four minutes, Cody!” Rex repeated, outraged.

“Four minutes, eight seconds,” Ahsoka said in an innocent voice. “Or so I was told,” she continued, when everyone turned to stare at her in surprise.

Cody grinned. “Got you beat. Five minutes.”

Anakin crossed his arms. “Eight hours.”

“Four and a half years,” Obi-Wan intoned dryly. “I win.”

Cody turned his head and gave Obi-Wan a look of utter consternation. “Four and a half—how did you—no. Never mind, please don’t tell me. I do not want to fucking know.”

“It’s entertaining,” Anakin offered.

“Still don’t want to know,” Cody retorted.

Obi-Wan lifted his head before Ahsoka could comment, or burst out laughing—she wasn’t certain which it would have been. “Mara?”

That caught their attention, mirth replaced by quiet readiness in the blink of an eye.

“She’s all right?” Rex asked. “Wolffe, too?”

Obi-Wan nodded, holding up his hand to request silence. Then he frowned. “A problem? What sort of problem?”

 

*          *          *          *

 

Wolffe saw Cody, crossed his arms, and growled. “Oh, you have so much explaining to do, brother.”

“Leave it, Wolffe,” Rex said. Obi-Wan was following them into the primary security room for the base, which Mara and Wolffe had taken over after losing track of Takann. Anakin and Ahsoka were just behind him, acting as rear guard. It hadn’t escaped Obi-Wan’s attention that he’d been effectively boxed in, but he didn’t mind. He felt like he was going to fall over any damned moment as it was, and they still had to get the hell off of this planet. He’d given up on the rifle—his shoulder hurt too much to carry it or brace properly for firing—but the lightsaber was a comforting weight at his side.

“Twenty damn years,” Wolffe started to say, but Obi-Wan cut him off.

“His chip never deteriorated.”

Wolffe’s eyes widened in shock. “Absolute kriffing hells, Cody. How did you stay sane?”

Cody smirked. “Got a news flash there for ya.”

“Yeah, yeah. Damn.” Wolffe straightened his shoulders. “I want to hear about this later.”

“You and everyone else,” Cody said.

Obi-Wan had no sooner opened his mouth to ask Mara what they’d found when he was all but tackled by his Padawan, who hugged him hard enough that his bones creaked in protest.

“Hello, Mara.”

“You are such an _asshole,_ ” Mara hissed into his shoulder. “I missed you. I am not _used_ to missing people.”

“No, normally you shoot them the first time,” Obi-Wan agreed in a mild voice.

“Very funny.” Mara stepped back and scowled at him. “No more kidnappings by second-rate Adepts. If you let that happen again, _I_ will shoot you and save them the trouble.”

Obi-Wan smiled. _None of your threats will deter me from being glad that you are here._

Mara rolled her eyes. _That’s because you’re ridiculous._

“What happened to Takann?” Rex asked. “Is he dead?”

“Fucker got away.” Wolffe tilted his head at the viewscreens dominating one wall of the room. “We saw what you did to the stick-Adept in that small hangar bay. Hope it made you feel better.”

Obi-Wan wasn’t sure if it had made him feel better. Vindictive, maybe, but not better. “He won’t be bothering anyone again, at least.”

“We saw what happened to the other one, also,” Mara said. “The woman.”

“Tiritha.” Cody’s lips thinned. “Not a second-rate Adept, that one.”

Obi-Wan had to swallow back a very unpleasant, visceral reaction. “They were recording that?”

“They were.” Mara gave him a level look. “I deleted the footage, and the backups.”

Obi-Wan closed his eyes. One potential pitfall dealt with, then. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Let me introduce you to our problem,” she said, and led him around the control panel. Three steps down led them into a recessed pit in the floor below the monitors.

“Oh, yes. I can see what you meant by problem,” Obi-Wan said. The human man, bound and gagged, glared up at him in yellow-eyed rage. Obi-Wan took a step closer and the man strained forward, his attack foiled by the cuffs around his hands and ankles.

“Who is he?” Obi-Wan asked, studying their prisoner. He was white-haired, with stress lines of harsh living on his face, but Obi-Wan suspected he was no older than twenty-five, perhaps twenty-eight Standard at most.

“He won’t say. Most of what we’ve gotten out of him is growled nonsense,” Mara told him.

Cody was resting one hand on his blaster. “We’re keeping Adepts instead of killing them, now?” Wolffe was still side-eying his brother, possibly wanting to punch him and hug him at the same time.

“He’s not an Adept.” Mara crossed her arms and gazed down at the bound man. “I don’t think he’s a willing convert, either.”

“Why is he gagged?” Ahsoka asked.

“Kid’s a biter,” Wolffe explained, holding up his left hand. “He got me right through my glove, too. I hope the little shit isn’t rabid.”

“An Inquisitor? I thought they were all dead,” Rex said.

Anakin was shaking his head. “No, he’s not an Inquisitor. Vader didn’t claim people unless they _wanted_ to do the job.” He frowned. “And I think all of the other Inquisitors are dead. Jerec is the only holdout that nobody has confirm on.”

“All right, then he’s not an Inquisitor.” Ahsoka regarded the man with a thoughtful expression. “I’m not sure I understand why you believe him to be an unwilling convert.”

“Because Mara recognized the Force Compulsion this man is suffering under.” Obi-Wan knelt down next to their prisoner, who lurched at him in another failed attack. He could see lines and forms within the man’s mental structure, blocking memory and certain neurochemical reactions. It was enough to turn his stomach; they reminded him of the mental box that Venge’s memories had been trapped in.

“Dammit,” he murmured, and then looked up at the others. “There is also a very crude series of memory blocks in place. I doubt he remembers much about himself beyond his own name.”

“Well, that’s a start,” Anakin said. “Let’s ask him.” Obi-Wan pulled the gag, yanking his fingers out of biting range just in time. “Hey! What’s your name?” The only response Anakin received was as Mara had stated—unintelligible growling.

“That didn’t work very well.”

Mara treated Anakin to an irritated glare. “We already tried the obvious, thank you.”

“Yeah, sorry.” Anakin pursed his lips. “Maybe he just doesn’t speak Basic.”

“Language isn’t the problem.” Obi-Wan tilted his head back and forth, trying to make sense of the constructs he was seeing. This had not been done with finesse, though it might be more accurate to say it was done without concern or regard for the person being mentally warped and confined.

Then he caught sight of one single thread, the sickly dark red and ethereal green that often denoted blood magic. “Oh. That explains a lot.”

“Bad news?” Cody asked.

“A bit.” Obi-Wan sat back, resting his hands on his knees. “I think he’s been programmed to only respond to commands from very specific types of people.”

“The Adepts,” Ahsoka guessed.

Anakin made a sour face. “Or Sidious.”

“Then there’s nothing we can do for him,” Wolffe said, but Obi-Wan shook his head.

“There might be.” Obi-Wan looked down at his left arm. There was wounded flesh beneath the bandaging, still stinging as it attempted to knit and heal. He knew without needing to look that the tattoo’s center line down the inside of his arm would be marred. He had spent hours deliberately not considering it, because the damage, the idea of a permanent reminder of their separation—

Gods, it was enraging.

Obi-Wan glanced up at Anakin, who understood his intent without anything needed to be said. “Are you sure?”

“No, but it will just be for a few moments.” Obi-Wan curled his right hand around his left arm, feeling the beginning sparks of an emotional upheaval, one that was as much delayed anguish and heartbreak as it was anger. “I would very much like it if none of you kill me in the next few minutes.”

“Why?” Ahsoka sounded suspicious, but also concerned.

“I am about to do something that I _really_ do not like doing,” Obi-Wan replied, swallowing back nerves and bile. He had not done this in a while, and was worried that, once uncovered, those particular feelings would be difficult to shove back down again. “Also, I’m probably going to vomit afterwards.”

“Obi-Wan?” Rex’s hand dropped onto his shoulder. _Still trust you._

Obi-Wan closed his eyes. _Thank you. Back away, please,_ and waited until he could hear Rex’s retreating steps.

Gods damn Jenna Zan Arbor, and what she had done to him with Fire.

 _You have no idea how much I do_ not _want this!_

There was remembered pain, agonized burning from the lightsaber wound as Sidious whispered to him in his false voice, the benevolent politician: _You will pay attention. Won’t you, my apprentice?_

So many names, the litany that had carried him through the years after Sixty-Six. His grief had been an unknown fuel for utter rage: AnakinPadméAhsokaTerzaGarenSiriKitFistoBant

MundiKothAnakinPadméLiamMaceAhsokaSaeseeKolarShaakTiKimalJocastaPloAaylaAhsoka

AnakinPadméBarrissLuminaraStassColemanOhGodsANAKIN—

Venge opened his eyes, air rushing between his clenched teeth as he drew in a breath. There was a gasp from behind him, startled swearing and at least one blaster readied, but he ignored it all.

Their prisoner was staring at him in rapt fascination, all hint of defiance gone from him. Venge had been correct, and it made him want to reassemble Tamoeth and then disintegrate him, all over again.

“What is your name?” Venge asked in a soft whisper. Even his voice was marked by what he’d awoken.

“Solusar,” their prisoner said. “Kam Solusar.”

“Son of a bitch,” Cody muttered. “That’s creepy as hell.”

“Solusar.” Venge frowned; this man did not look familiar, but Solusar was a name that stirred memory. “Who was your teaching Master, Kam Solusar?”

Solusar’s expression was lit by sickening adoration. “My Lord Sidious.”

“No!” Venge bit back the rest of his vehemence; shouting at this poor idiot would not help. “Not him. Who was your teaching Master among the _Jedi_ , Kam Solusar?”

Solusar’s expression faltered. “I do not know.”

Venge nudged at those constructed boxes and barriers. He was gentle enough not to cause damage, but not so gentle that Solusar was not immediately aware that there was a trespasser in his thoughts.

“You know which door that information lies behind,” Venge told him, and then laced his voice with the strength of command. “Find it.”

Solusar’s gaze unfocused as he went inward, doing as instructed. “I cannot get through,” he said, when only seconds had passed. “It is not for me to do so.”

“Then please, allow me,” Venge said, and after making sure it would not do permanent damage, ripped down the barrier that Solusar had found.

Solusar shrieked, an ear-splitting cry of pain, and would have curled in on himself if not for his bindings. Venge waved his hand, freeing Solusar from confinement.

“Is that a good idea?” Ahsoka asked.

“I think we can deal with a single, traumatized Acolyte,” Mara retorted.

Venge felt his lips twitch, but he kept his attention on Solusar. “Who was your teacher, Solusar?”

Solusar lifted his head. The yellow light in his eyes was flickering like a gutted candle. “Ranik. Ranik Solusar. My father.”

“What happened to him, Kam?” Venge asked, trying to keep his voice quiet. It was the closest he could get to soothing.

“I don’t….I don’t know.”

“Dear gods.” Wolffe, sad and sympathetic. “This poor fucking bastard.”

“Find the wall, Kam,” Venge ordered him again. “You know where that information should be.”

Solusar found the next block in his path in moments, and then turned desperate eyes upon Venge. Venge nodded and dismantled that wall, as well, which was far more solid than the first. It did not cause Solusar undue pain; it must have been the sudden emotional input that had felled him the first time.

“Dead.” Solusar’s eyes were leaking tears. “They killed him. Oh, Force, they killed him.”

Venge leaned forward. “Where?”

“I don’t, I—” Solusar growled and then went hunting for the next block without needing to be told. “Here, it’s here, please!”

Venge choked on fumes that did not exist, a noxious trap hidden within the foul construction of the block around this set of memories. He shook his head, waving away help that was not needed. He would have to be more careful.

“The Well, it was the Well,” Solusar gasped. Venge had a terrible moment, wondering how the Solusar clan had possibly gotten near the Well of the Dark Side on Mortis, before Solusar was all but shouting out further details. “Belsavis. Plett’s Well, we were hidden. We were hidden, it was safe, but it wouldn’t stay safe, no place was safe, we _saw_ the Temple—”

Venge reached out and grabbed Solusar’s hand before the man could start tearing at his eyes. “No. Listen to me. After Belsavis. Where?”

Solusar’s hesitated, panting for breath, then he went and tore down the next block on his own. Venge watched, making sure he would not harm himself in the process, but it seemed that Solusar was a fast learner. There did not seem to be any more traps, either, which was as relieving as it was strange.

“The Altisians.” Solusar’s shoulders slumped. “The Altisians came for us. They promised we would be safer with them. Master Plett, my father, all of the kids—”

“Oh, gods,” Anakin said in a strangled voice. “Sidious found the Altisian Contingent.”

“Oh, no,” Ahsoka murmured. “No one had heard from them in years, but I’d hoped…”

Solusar was still ripping at the barriers in his mind. Venge shook his head and slowed him down. “Careful. Too fast, and you will wound yourself.”

“I have to know!” Solusar cried. “I have to know what happened to them!”

KcajBillabaKunguramaTkeeTachiAbellaAlannSevLoorneKetoDrallig—

“Kam.” Venge grasped the man by his shoulders with both hands, staring into his eyes. The yellow of corruption was utterly gone; all that remained was a pale brown that was filled with horrified awareness and despair. “You know what happened to them.”

Solusar gaped at him. Then the full gravity of the situation struck him as blocks and boundaries within his memories continued to fall. Then he screamed out raw grief and buried his face against Venge’s chest.

Venge tried not to flinch at the sudden contact. Gods-all, he apparently still had issues left over from Fire. He gingerly embraced Solusar, who had broken down into quiet sobbing. Solusar’s hands were like bony claws on his back, clinging and trying to tear their way through fabric and flesh like it would alter time and fate.

Tears fell from his own eyes like individual trails of acid. “I am so sorry,” Venge whispered.

“How many were with the Altisian Contingent when the war ended?” Rex asked.

“Several hundred,” Anakin replied in a hollow voice. “And if they were picking up survivors who escaped the initial Order…”

Ahsoka had always been the most gentle of them, even in her fierceness. “Was it all of them, Kam?”

“Yes!” Solusar wailed, his body bowing with the force of his grief. “There were—there were hundreds of us!”

“They spared only those who would turn, or those that they could force to turn,” Venge said. “This was not your fault.”

Kam jerked back from him. His skin was shock-pale, making the red blotches and red-rimmed eyes stand out in stark relief. “You can’t know that!”

Venge cut off the mental litany before it could repeat itself. He needed to calm down, not work himself up into a genuinely explosive rage. “I do know that. Everyone here knows that. If your father were to stand here, right now, he would also tell you that you hold no blame.”

“How can you say that?” Solusar’s eyes were narrowing, recognition filtering in. “You’re one of _them!_ ”

“No. I am not.”

“Then…” Solusar shook his head, confused but not veering towards violence. “Then, what are you?”

“The old word was _Je’daii,_ ” Venge said, lifting his hand to wipe his face dry. “They were not Jedi, nor Sith. There had not yet been a Schism.”

“Jeh-dah-ee,” Solusar repeated slowly, brow wrinkling.

“One who is both,” Anakin said quietly. “New piece of the puzzle, huh?”

“One of several.” Venge sighed and stood up before helping Solusar climb to his feet.

Solusar stared at him, eyes wide. “I—I know you. From the war posters. You’re Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

He managed to smile. “Most of the time.”

Solusar glanced at the others, a perplexed frown on his face. “Actually, I remember…most of you. Not you,” he said, pointing at Mara, who seemed amused by that. “But…you two. You’re both Jedi. Aren’t you all supposed to be dead?”

Anakin snickered. “Not lately.”

Venge looked at Mara. “Take a left from the door, end of the hall,” she answered the unspoken question. Venge nodded and headed out without another word.

The hallway was quiet; either the others had done a hell of a job of wiping out Imperial forces, or the Imperials were retreating in the face of lost Adepts. Or Takann was gathering them up somewhere else, regrouping and preparing for a new assault. The last option was not appealing.

The ’fresher was a smaller locker room, meant for shift changes among officers working in this section of the base. Venge went to the row of sinks, turning on the cold water with a vicious twist. His left hand slipped from the other tap, refusing to grip tightly enough to turn the handle. Dammit. He bit his lip and used his right hand to turn the valve, then glanced up at the mirror.

His eyes were still burning, almost as brightly as the light created by A Drop of Fire.

“No.” _Put that back where it belongs._

Venge closed his eyes, but that was worse. He could see Solusar’s stricken face, followed by the flash of a small child with the man’s white hair and brown eyes, just barely old enough to wander the Temple with his Clan.

Those faces, the children with him—he had seen some of those bodies in the Temple.

 _No, no, no—gods, no, you_ have _to let this go!_

PadméTupEchoWaxerJesseKiGarenSiriStassTuftEelWooleyAaylaKimalShaakTiMace

AgenSaeseePloBarrissFey17BoilKixZedBantAhsokaReeftAnakinFives—

Venge had made a terrible mistake. He hadn’t wanted to tap in to his hatred for Sidious, not wanting to frighten the others with the ice that always came with it. Grief had seemed like the safer option.

He’d forgotten. Grief was what had broken him the first time.

His arm hurt. His shoulder burned, an agony so sudden and strong that he panicked, certain he was still trapped in that fucking room.

He opened his eyes, gasping for air that did not want to come. Acid tears and crippling rage—

 _Hold him!_ Venge heard, shouted in Ulic’s commanding voice. Then the scent of electrical fire, ozone, and burning tar overwhelmed him.

That was invitation enough. He leaned over and vomited what little he’d eaten in the past few hours into the sink basin. He rinsed it down and then was dry heaving again for long minutes, clutching the sink and trying not to collapse.

He waited until his legs could hold him, then washed his face and rinsed his mouth with lukewarm water. His skin was too hot to the touch, like he’d just passed through a terrible fever.

 _Feel better?_ Anakin asked him a moment later.

Obi-Wan thought about it. _A bit._ Not perfect, not even remotely all right…but better than he had been a few minutes ago.

_Yeah, thought so. I’m sending Rex to get you. The rest of us are busy trying to convince Kam that no, he really does not have to commit ritual suicide per the Order’s old standards of Fallen Jedi._

_We didn’t actually do that,_ Obi-Wan replied. Granted, there had often been deliberate execution instead, something he desperately did not want to think about right now.

That made him look up, wanting to make sure he’d at least gotten Sith amber out of his eyes. “Fuck,” he muttered, disheartened.

He’d broken every single mirror in the room.

Rex found him still staring at the shattered glass. “Well, that’s a hell of a way to keep vanity out of the ranks.”

Obi-Wan turned to look at him. Rex had his helmet off and tucked under his arm; for a moment, he hallucinated Phase II armor and a younger face, which did not do much to improve his state of mind.

“Anakin said it was names. You were running the Litany through your head.”

Obi-Wan swallowed, unnerved that his control had again slipped badly enough to be heard. “It’s such a very long list.”

“It is,” Rex agreed. “I had to stop doing it, myself. I couldn’t make it through all of them without just…I would start feeling like a failure because I was still alive.”

“You’re not a failure,” Obi-Wan whispered.

“Neither are you,” Rex replied, which caused him a deep, internal pang. “Come here.”

Obi-Wan nodded and obeyed. He was so damned tired, worn to the bone, so Rex actually managed to surprise Obi-Wan when he kissed him.

It was a comfort he didn’t expect, a gentle, soothing warmth. Rex’s gloved hand cupped the back of his head, fingers caught in Obi-Wan’s hair. He whimpered, almost overwhelmed. Tired or not, he _still_ wanted to climb this man like a tree.

Rex chuckled, a warm breath against his lips. “I heard that.”

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan said, with no real idea of what he was apologizing for. There was simply too much in his head, all of it crowing for attention at once.

“Hey, no. Look at me.” Rex waited until Obi-Wan was looking into his eyes, his gaze dark and serious. “There isn’t a one of us back there that doesn’t understand what you just did.”

“I don’t—” His voice cracked. “What is it that you think I did?”

Rex took Obi-Wan’s right hand and placed it over his chest, a Mando’a gesture of one vowing that they spoke truly. “Watched you risk your life, and probably your sanity, to help that kid. You didn’t have to do that.” He grinned. “Hell, Wolffe almost shot you on pure damned instinct.”

The _beskar’gam_ was cool beneath his fingers. “I don’t think I have that much sanity left to risk.”

“Maybe,” Rex allowed. “I definitely thought so after Bothawui. But my point stands, asshole: We get it. Doesn’t mean we want to see it again any time soon, though,” he said, which made Obi-Wan smile.

“Better. You ready to go back?” Rex asked.

Obi-Wan looked down at Rex’s armor. “One hundred forty-four,” he murmured, tracing one of the carved-out lines with his fingertip. “You’re wearing your Litany.”

“Yeah.”

Obi-Wan took Rex’s arm and turned it so that the faded gold emblem of the Jedi Order was visible. “Does that make it better or worse than saying it aloud?”

Rex shrugged. “Depends on the day, really. Come on,” he said, and used Obi-Wan’s grip on his arm to lead him from the room.

By the time it occurred to him that they were in perfect position to be ambushed, it had already happened. Rex stumbled to one side, letting out a pained cry; Obi-Wan raised his lightsaber and caught the red blade before it could bisect his Captain, shoving the Adept back with a Force push that was more furious instinct than actual intent.

Takann grinned at him, revealing his blackened stump of a tongue. Obi-Wan spared a moment to make certain that Rex was alive, and not in danger of dying. Then he proceeded to wipe the smirk off of Takann’s face.

It was a short, furious fight; the Adept might have been good with knives, but knives wouldn’t save him from a lightsaber and Obi-Wan’s undivided attention. Obi-Wan shoved his blade into Takann’s midsection, grimacing when the Adept let out a fetid gasp that struck him full in the face.

He heard running feet, the others approaching, and paranoia reared its head—the last thing he wanted to deal with was another Maul. He stole Takann’s lightsaber from his weakening grasp and shoved it through the bastard’s throat. Takann gurgled and fell.

“Okay, _now_ we’re down to zero Adepts,” Ahsoka said, and time resumed with a sickening jolt.

Obi-Wan lowered his lightsaber. “How long was that?”

“About three seconds,” Rex answered him. Obi-Wan forced himself to turn away from what he knew was a corpse. Rex was leaning against the wall, his hand clasped to his right side.

Wolffe shook his head. “Brother, I can’t take you anywhere.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Rex groused.

“Are you all right?” Anakin asked.

“Damned vibroblades.” Rex straightened up, grimacing. “Armor took most of it. It isn’t bad.”

Obi-Wan shut down his lightsaber. “I’d really like to leave now, before anything _else_ happens.”

“Same here.” Rex lifted his hand away from his side long enough to see blood oozing through the joints in his armor, cursed under his breath, and put his hand back in place. “We just have twenty SDs to get rid of, first.”

“Actually, we’re down to two.” Anakin glanced over at Mara, who looked extremely pleased with herself. “Someone used the security system to make them think a Triple-Zero Recall had been ordered.”

“Eighteen Star Destroyers are rushing back to Coruscant.” Obi-Wan shook his head, amused. “Isard will be so pleased.”

“I’m surprised there are any destroyers left at all,” Cody said. “Disobeying a Trip-Zero is treason.”

“Maybe the punishment for leaving this place unguarded is more frightening than a firing squad.” Ahsoka made a face. “Which is really not reassuring.”

“No, it’s not.” Obi-Wan glanced down at the corpse, then down the hall. There was a sense of danger brewing—not here, not yet, but it dominated their immediate future. “Rex. Get that patched up.”

“Shit. I know that tone,” Rex said in response.

“What the hell _is_ that?” Anakin asked, brow wrinkling.

“Trouble.” Obi-Wan looked at Kam Solusar. The man still had a bewildered expression on his face, but he was following the conversation with sharp focus. Obi-Wan debated for a second before tossing the man his old lightsaber.

Kam almost fumbled the catch, surprised. “Er—why?”

“You know how to use one, yes?” Obi-Wan asked. Kam nodded. “Good, because you’re about to get your wish.”

Cody sighed and rolled his eyes. “The meat clankers. Dammit, kid, I thought your face looked familiar.”

“Everyone is making less sense than usual. Again,” Mara complained, eyes narrowed. “Please enlighten the rest of us.”

“On the lowest floor of this facility is a cloning factory that is based around the idea of making clone soldiers that are not people. Just programming.” Obi-Wan accepted his leather-wrapped lightsaber from Anakin, running his thumb along the blue sheen of metal. His old lightsaber was still so very familiar, but this one felt _right_ , more appropriate to the person he was now rather than the person he had been. “Most, if not all of them, are genetic copies of Solusar.”

Kam blanched. “I didn’t know they were doing that.”

“None of us are surprised by that at all.” Obi-Wan watched as Wolffe and Rex sniped at each other while Wolffe did an excellent job of field-dressing the wound in Rex’s side. “Does that med kit have stim tabs?”

Cody raised an eyebrow at him. “Didn’t you swear off of those after the first time?”

“Yes, but I also don’t want to die.” Thirty to eight were very good odds, considering who the eight of them were, but Obi-Wan was not in the mood to take chances. There were also still stormtroopers to contend with. “What’s the fastest way out of here?”

“We’re ground level. Closest exit is about a quarter-klik that way,” Cody said, but Mara was already shaking her head.

“They’ll be guarding the easiest ways out.”

“Yeah, which is why he said fastest,” Cody shot back. “Excuse me for providing useful information. Rooftop access is our best way out of here.”

Rex sighed. “Great. Skywalker, if you throw me off of this building, I’m shooting you.”

“Hey, it’s tradition.” Anakin grinned at him. “At least it won’t be exploding beneath our feet at the same time.”

Ahsoka gave her former Master a too-sweet smile. “If that actually happens, we all get to blame you.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

“I think that was the most terrifying hyperspace flight I’ve ever had,” Wedge said.

Luke glanced at him from the corner of his eye. “The Maw, Wedge.”

Wedge shook his head. “Nope, still not as terrifying as plowing through the Deep Core in the spatial equivalent of a straight line.”

“We have Star Destroyers on the scopes, gentlemen,” Captain Ghulam reminded them. “Would one of you like to make battle plans, or shall I do it while you discuss our good fortune?”

“Call it, Ex-Boss.”

“Just two destroyers, huh?” Luke stared out of the viewport, but they were still a bit too distant for specific details to stand out on an SD. “What class?”

Ghulam looked at the officer manning the closest station for sensor readouts. “Ensign?”

“An Imp-II Class and an Interdictor, Commander.” The ensign flinched. “Er, sir. Jedi. Uhm.”

“It’s fine, thank you,” Luke said, if only to spare the poor kid the embarrassment.

“That Interdictor could make things interesting if we waded in and then needed a quick escape.” Ghulam regarded them both with a trained Imperial officer’s implacable gaze. Luke had found himself wondering multiple times since their first meeting if Ghulam had spent any significant time in Vader’s presence before jumping ship. Imperial officers with long-term Vader exposure were either some of the most unflappable people that Luke had ever met, or they had a lot of obvious nervous tics. “Any time, gentlemen.”

“Launch all three fighter squadrons,” Luke said, and Wedge smiled, sharp and pleased. “Rogue, Gauntlet, and Corsair squads are going to go say hello to our new friends.”

“You coming with us?” Wedge asked.

Luke frowned, listening to the threads of possibility. It was a lot easier now than it had been thirteen hours ago. He still couldn’t make out Force signatures at a distance, which was frustrating, but the best path forward presented itself easily enough. “No, I think I’m going to be needed on the surface. Captain, the moment the fighters are engaged, I want you to move the _Tatius_ into firing range and give that Interdictor hell.”

“My frigate will not take extensive pounding from a destroyer,” Ghulam pointed out. “I don’t have the firepower to net you a victory.”

“That’s all right. I just want you in there to draw the destroyers away from the planet,” Luke said. “The fighters are going to take out the SDs.”

“Ah.” Ghulam nodded at Antilles. “Then I hope your squadron’s reputation is well-deserved, Commander.”

“To be honest, they’re probably toning it down just to make everything sound plausible. See you soon, Luke,” Wedge said, and headed off the bridge to get everyone in the air.

Luke tried to ignore a sense of intense misgiving about Wedge’s departure. He got that _every_ time the Rogues went into battle. It was a side-effect of risking your life. “All right, then. Let’s see if we can’t contact Colonel DeSoto’s man on the ground.”

“Lieutenant Fane, you heard the man.”

“Yes, Captain.” Fane was already holding a comm to her ear, tucking it partially underneath her fur. “I’ve got signal lock. It’s a handheld comm; I’ll have to boost power to get a clearer transmission.”

“Do it, but don’t burn out the station in the process,” Ghulam instructed.

“Yes, sir.” Fane smiled, revealing sharp canine teeth. “Got it,” she said, and motioned that she was switching to full speaker.

“Who the absolute hell is this?” a man with a deep voice growled. Luke had an odd moment of wondering how Boba Fett had crawled back out of the Sarlacc before he realized the man’s tone was different—gruffer, longer drawl on the accent.

Luke nodded at Ghulam. “It’s your ship, Captain.”

Ghulam gave him a look of appreciation at the courtesy. “Commander Naasade, this is Captain Arram Ghulam of the Alliance frigate _Tatius_. Please send us a confirmation code so that we may verify your identity.”

“Bit busy right now!” Naasade replied. Luke cocked his head, listening to a steady hail of blaster fire striking surfaces near the commander. Underneath that, he was almost certain he could hear the hum of a lightsaber.

Ghulam closed his eyes for a brief moment. “I realize that, Commander, but our situation is precarious, and I don’t want to risk my men without a confirm. The faster you do so, the faster we can render assistance.”

“Fuck—fine! Is the short-code for the Alpha Eight acceptable?”

“Alpha Eight has been compromised as of five days ago, confirmed by agents on the Outer Rim,” Fane said, earning a reproving glare from her captain. “Try the Delta-Tango Twelve.”

Naasade rattled off a string of numbers and letters at a speed that left Luke impressed with the Commander’s memory. He couldn’t cold-pull a full confirmation code that fast.

Fane’s expression brightened. “Confirmed, sir.”

“Commander, our forces will be in position to draw away the destroyers orbiting the planet above your location,” Ghulam said. “Will you need an extraction?”

“We’re making our way to an escape craft now. As long as it’s still there and in one piece, we should be good. It’ll be nice not to have to dodge turbolaser fire—hold on.” Luke learned how many of Ghulam’s crew were rookies by the number of distressed faces he saw at the sound of repeated, close-range blaster fire.

“How the hell did you get here so fast, anyway? You’re twenty-three hours ahead of schedule!”

“There is an artificial hyperlane near Kuat,” Ghulam answered. “We’re fortunate that one of the Alliance’s recent acquisitions knew about its existence. How long will your self-extraction take, Commander? We can distract your orbital opposition, but not for very long.”

“If you can give us thirty minutes, we’ll make it,” Naasade said. “If it takes longer than that, we’re probably too dead to care.”

Ghulam and Luke exchanged glances. “Commander, I have someone coming down to assist your escape. I’m told he’s actually an asset and not a detriment in combat situations.”

“Thanks,” Luke said dryly.

“Tell him to hurry the hell up, then.” That was followed by the distinct click of a signal disconnect.

Luke smiled. “Gets right to the point, doesn’t he?”

Ghulam looked thoughtful. “Have you ever met any of the clone soldiers who served in the Clone Wars, Knight Skywalker?”

Luke shook his head. “I was never stationed with the few serving in the Alliance. Why?”

“You’re about to do so.” Ghulam jerked his head in the direction of the bulkhead doors. “Go. I want you back here with the Commander in twenty-five minutes. The clock starts now.”

R2-D2 was already waiting in his prepped X-Wing, which dramatically cut down on his own prep time. The burn down to the planet would put him five minutes into the countdown. Luke thought it would be tight, but the Rogues had pulled off miracles in a shorter amount of time.

“Challenge accepted, Captain.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

They got to the roof without serious incident, stealing comms along the way until everyone had one, sharing a channel. Anakin didn’t want to take a chance on long-distance mental contact, not when it was still hard to discern identities beyond the ten-meter mark.

Rex jumped off of the roof before Anakin could give him a Force-assisted boost. Spoilsport.

The oversized, black-armored bio-soldiers didn’t hesitate to jump off the roof right after them.

“Those things are fucking creepy,” Wolffe muttered, a sentiment Anakin definitely agreed with. Darksiders would at least feel correct to his senses, if vile and dangerous, but the bio-soldiers’ only influence on the Force was a buzzing sense of nausea-inducing wrongness.

“I’m just glad they’re wearing helmets, so I don’t have to look at my own face,” Kam said, and then ducked when blaster fire came too close, searing his hair.

“Split up!” Obi-Wan yelled, grabbing Kam and pulling him down a side alley. Anakin wound up sprinting down a street with Cody. Four of the bioengineered monstrosities followed them, along with two full squads of stormtroopers.

The comms worked to keep everyone in contact right until the Imperials blocked every frequency but their own.

“Well, that lasted about five minutes longer than I expected,” Anakin said, shoving the now-useless comm into a trouser pocket. “Keep going! We’ll either find them on the way or meet them at the ship.”

Anakin found out the hard way that the creepy assholes were wearing Cortosis armor when his lightsaber shorted out on his first attempt to bisect one of them. “Oh, shit.”

He ducked the first swing of the charged Force pike and tried to push the bio-soldier away with the Force. It skidded back maybe three centimeters. He would have had better luck actually reaching out and shoving the bio-soldier with his hands.

“Cody!”

Cody unloaded what must have been a full charge into the bio-soldier, concentrating fire at the neck joint. It should have been down with the first two shots, but there was a smoking hole in its neck and shoulder and it was _still standing._

“Okay, I officially suggest running for our lives,” Cody said. Anakin leapt back to avoid the pike that whooshed through the air where he’d been standing. The near-miss got him moving.

“How the hell have you survived all this time?” Cody asked him as they ran.

“Body armor!” Anakin replied, igniting his lightsaber the moment he could sense that the power cycle had completed.

“Oh, so at least one of you gained some sense over the years!”

“Uh.” Anakin glanced at Cody. It had just occurred to him that everyone in their core group knew who Vader had been except the commander at his side

Shit.

“After we survive this, I have some things to tell you, but you’re not allowed to shoot me because Rex has dibs,” Anakin said.

Cody gave him a sharp look. “Is this the sort of thing I _should_ shoot you for?”

“No, actually, it’s more like the sort of thing you should carve out my heart and eat it for.”

Cody made a disgusted face. “I could have lived the rest of my life without that kind of visual, Skywalker. I’ll just let Rex shoot you.”

Anakin smiled. “Thanks.”

They were in the middle of another firefight when Cody pulled a different comm from his jacket pocket. “They’re early,” he muttered. “Skywalker, keep those bastards busy!”

Anakin nodded and waded into the worst of the blaster fire, deflecting it back directly at the bio-soldiers. Reducing numbers would be great and all, but at least stormtroopers _died_ when you shot them. The bio-soldier with the hole in his neck was still standing, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side.

“Let’s go!” Cody yelled, while Anakin was still scowling over the fact that only one of the bio-soldiers was on the ground. It wasn’t even the one that should already have been dead. “We’ve got thirty minutes to get the hell off of this planet!”

They were halfway across the city, with no sign of the others, when they turned into an alley and almost ran face-first into a squad of stormtroopers. Anakin raised his hands and knocked them all on their asses with an instinctive Force-shove, but there was another squad just behind them, already preparing to fire.

“Go that way!” Anakin pointed at a narrow alcove that connected the next street. “I’ll go around, meet you two blocks down!” Cody nodded and took off. Anakin ducked to avoid panicked blaster fire and bolted in the opposite direction.

He noticed the buzzing in the Force just in time to avoid losing any more limbs, but not soon enough to avoid getting clobbered by a wall masquerading as a living being.

Anakin landed on the ground hard, his breath leaving his lungs in a painful exhale. He swung for one of the armor joints with his lightsaber and missed. “Fuck!” He dropped his disabled lightsaber just in time to catch the bio-soldier in the breastplate with his right hand; he wrestled for control of the Force pike with his left.

Servomotors in his arm were whining from the strain of keeping the bio-soldier from clawing his face off. He couldn’t get to the other weapons he carried, the Force was barely effective against the bio-soldiers, and his lightsaber was still rebooting. Great.

“Lift it up!” Anakin heard someone yell. He obeyed on instinct, pulling the extra strength forth through adrenaline and sheer force of will—and almost lost his fingertips to the pass of a green-bladed lightsaber as it removed the bio-soldier’s head from its shoulders.

Anakin gasped and shoved the still-twitching corpse aside. A hand appeared in front of his eyes, hauling him to his feet the moment Anakin reached out to take it.

For a moment, the only thing he could think to do was stare at his rescuer in complete astonishment.

Luke looked a bit older than he had at the Battle of Endor, maybe more than he should have, but war was bad for that. He’d grown his hair out; Anakin had a moment of feeling reality tilt when he realized it was the same length his own had been a couple of years ago. It wasn’t quite the same color, but…weird.

“Are you all right?” Luke asked, giving Anakin a calm, level look, as if he was prepared for things not to be.

Anakin blinked a few times and finally found his voice. “That was really damned dangerous.”

“Oh, I know.” The corner of Luke’s mouth lifted up, a faint smile that reminded him of Padmé in the worst and best possible ways. “That was the second new friend I’ve made this morning.”

“I guess it was a temporary friendship,” Anakin said, feeling like he was about a light year behind on the conversation. “What the hell are you _doing_ here?”

If anything, the faint smile was becoming more prevalent. “Colonel DeSoto sent me. She didn’t like the idea of sending Alliance soldiers out to fight Sith without…well, there is only one of me.”

“You came here alone?” Anakin asked, proud and appalled at the same time.

“Of course not.” Luke gave him a wide-eyed, innocent look that Anakin was going to blame Obi-Wan for entirely. “Everyone else is still in orbit, keeping the destroyers busy. Oh, and I have a droid, so technically, I’m not alone.”

Anakin bit back what would probably have been a near-hysterical giggle and threw his arms around Luke. “Hello.”

“Hi.” Luke was hugging him back, which was a relief. He hadn’t exactly warned his son, and Vader had not been the hugging type. “You know, this is really weird.”

Anakin stepped back and looked down at him. “Yeah, I’ve been saying that for…oh, several years now.”

“Years. Huh.” Luke seemed cheerfully resigned. “Yoda is really bad at telling people things, isn’t he?”

“Let me guess: He told you five useful things and left out the other twenty?” Luke nodded. “Yes, that sounds exactly like Yoda—”

“Look out!” Cody grabbed them both and yanked them back, nearly pulling Anakin off of his feet in the process. A second later, one of the bio-soldiers hit the ground with a sickening crunch of shattering armor and breaking body.

“Thanks,” Luke said to Cody, who nodded and then stared at him, as if just realizing who he’d saved.

Anakin glanced up to find the source of falling bio-soldiers and discovered Obi-Wan peering over the edge of the roof. “What did you do _that_ for?” Anakin asked, miffed.

“For science!” Obi-Wan replied, grinning.

 _Stim tabs,_ Anakin thought in resignation. “Whyyyyy?”

“Testing a hypothesis!” Obi-Wan looked pleased with himself, which usually meant bad news for everyone else. “I didn’t think they could fly, but you can’t be certain unless you experiment.”

“Is he…is he drugged?” Luke asked in a concerned undertone.

“Technically, no,” Anakin said, just as Kam popped into view. Anakin couldn’t tell if the man was happy or horrified. Maybe both at the same time.

Cody shook his head. “That man can drink a bar dry and still be the most sober person in the room, but one damned stim tab…”

“Ah.” Luke appeared to be considering something just before he looked up. “You know, you’re not really confirming your hypothesis unless the results of the experiment are repeatable.”

Obi-Wan blinked a few times. “You’re absolutely right. Come on, Kam. Let’s go find another one.”

“You are one of the most terrifying people I have ever met!” Kam shouted, right before they both disappeared.

“Did you just—what—” Anakin took a breath and tried again. “Why did you do that?”

“Well, you want him to go that way, right?” Luke asked, pointing in the direction the freighter was parked.

Anakin frowned. “Yes?”

“There are two more on a rooftop near that location. We saw them on the way in,” Luke said, smiling.

Cody started chuckling, more breath than sound. “I like him.”

“You’d better,” Anakin said, and realizing he was grinning, too. “Cody, this is my son. Luke, this is Cody. He’s an asshole.”

“That’s all right,” Luke said, as he held out his hand. “I’m friends with a large group of them.”

Cody smirked and gripped Luke’s arm. “You know, finding out he’d reproduced was one of the most distressing days of my life.”

“I’ve heard that before, too.” Luke smiled. “Nice to meet you, Commander.”

“Likewise, sir. What’s our exit time?”

“I’ve been challenged to get you all into orbit in twenty-five,” Luke answered. “We’ve got about fifteen minutes left.”

“We’re running behind, then,” Anakin said. “Time to go.”

“There they are!”

“Oh, come _on,_ ” Anakin muttered, as yet another damned squad of stormtroopers flooded into the street to try and kill them.

“This way,” Luke suggested, and led them down another alley at a dead run before pointing up at a walkway. “Shortcut.”

“I like shortcuts.” Anakin looked at Cody. “Ready?”

Cody glared at him. “Literally born ready.”

Anakin shrugged and lifted Cody with the Force in a swift rush that got him right onto the platform, his boots skidding on the metal before Cody recovered his balance. “Every time I didn’t ask, you guys complained! After you,” he added, glancing at Luke.

Luke’s expression was undecipherable until he spoke. “No martyrdom, all right? You’re going to be right behind us.”

Anakin pulled out his lightsaber and deflected the first two shots that came towards them. “I’m really, really bad at martyrdom. I like everyone alive at the end of the day, myself included.”

Luke nodded and jumped. Anakin only had to deflect a few more blasts before Cody was laying down covering fire, giving him the chance to follow. Then he almost fell right back off the platform when a shot hit the decking right under his feet. “Shit!”

Cody grabbed him and pulled him onto the walkway before he could fall. “Seriously. How the fuck did you survive twenty years without one of us guarding your back?”

Anakin winced, but Cody had already turned around, and didn’t see it. Luke raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“He doesn’t know,” Anakin mouthed as they traversed the walkway, which was shaking on rusting supports. Byss must have one hell of a corrosive atmosphere over the long-term. Structural integrity was not being helped by the fact that stormtroopers were hammering the bottom of the walkway with blaster fire. “He’ll probably shoot me later.”

“He’ll have to jockey for place on the list,” Luke murmured, which made Anakin snort sudden laughter.

Rex and Ahsoka met them at the end of the walkway. “Wolffe and Jade are about a minute ahead of us. We had to stop and deal with a few of our new friends,” Ahsoka told them, while trying not to stare at Luke.

Rex was glancing back and forth between Luke and Anakin. “Okay. Now I believe it.”

Anakin shook his head. “This man created Rogue Squadron, and you didn’t think he was my kid?”

“You are _not_ the only crazy bastard in the galaxy, Skywalker,” Rex shot back, and then paused. “Oh, that’s going to get awkward in a hurry.”

Luke was smiling. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Do you…do you know who we are?” Ahsoka asked, while they made their way down the stairwell. Rex was in the lead; Anakin was at the tail of the group, both of them alert for stormtroopers and bio-soldiers.

“Not a clue,” Luke said. “And I imagine it means that Yoda is off somewhere giggling about it.”

Anakin made a derisive sound. “Oh, probably.” He was going to have a stern talk with Yoda about _timing_ and disclosure that…well, Yoda would probably ignore him, but it would feel good to be the one justifiably lecturing the troll, for once.

Introductions had been made by the time they got back to the freighter, where Wolffe and Mara were already waiting. Mara saw them first and narrowed her eyes, lips turning down in a displeased frown as she noticed Luke. Then she apparently resolved to ignore him, and glared at Anakin instead. “Where _is_ he?”

“Relax, they’re right behind us,” Anakin said, and then whirled in tandem with Luke and Ahsoka, all three of them catching laser blasts. “And so is everyone else.”

Three bodies went down just before Mara shot the forth. “And that is why I still carry a blaster.”

“Smart lady,” Wolffe grunted, and then proceeded to wipe out the next two squads before they could get a shot off.

“This direction, too,” Rex said. Anakin rolled his eyes and turned around to face the new threat. “Not quite here yet, but they’ll see us at any moment.”

Anakin glanced up. There was another walkway over that street, suspended by cables that looked like they were already rusting through. “Man, maintenance is not doing a great job on upkeep, are they?”

Rex lifted his head. “Got it. Cody?”

“I see it,” Cody replied, both of them raising blaster pistols in the same moment, firing on weakened supports. By the time the squad finally noticed them, the walkway was collapsing.

When the dust cleared, there was only one trooper still on his feet—at least until Mara nailed him. “Don’t celebrate yet,” she said. “Bio-soldiers incoming.”

Anakin sighed and faced the other way again. “At least there’s just two,” he said, and then flinched back when a black-armored body fell from above, crushing the wounded one. The remaining bio-soldier spun around to view his fallen companion, just in time for Obi-Wan to drop the illusion that masked him from view.

“Hello, there,” Obi-Wan said, and shoved his lightsaber straight through the bio-soldier’s unprotected throat.

Anakin shut down his lightsaber when he realized that for the moment, they were out of stormtroopers. “Or we can just do that. That works, too.”

Kam landed with a muted thump next to Obi-Wan and the pile of dead bio-soldiers. “You are completely nuts.”

“And?” Obi-Wan asked him, after a long, curious pause.

“Nothing. I just wanted to know if you were aware,” Kam said.

Cody glanced at his wrist. “Eight minutes, if you want to win that bet.”

“It wasn’t a bet,” Luke replied, as Obi-Wan and Kam joined them. “But it would still be nice to make it under the twenty-five mark.”

“What are you doing here?” Obi-Wan asked, giving Luke a baffled look. “I meant to ask before, but gravity.”

“Ah, well.” Luke was biting back a smile. “Mouse says hello.”

“Oh. Of course,” Obi-Wan said, some of the bafflement fading.

“As does Yoda,” Luke continued, and Obi-Wan frowned. “And…” Luke hesitated. “You’re really loud.”

Obi-Wan’s expression went flat. “Fuck.”

“It’s fine,” Luke said, and hugged him.

Obi-Wan sighed and returned the hug. “No, it isn’t.” Anakin felt a pang of sadness; they both should have gotten more time together the first go-round.

“Seven minutes,” Cody said pointedly.

“Yeah, okay.” Luke drew back. “Five-one-one-two for the comm, but we swapped to the Beta Twenty for the encryption. There’s room in the _Tatius’s_ hanger, but it’s going to be tight.”

“Got it.” Anakin glanced at Mara just in time to catch her scowling. “What?”

“We’re riding an Alliance cruiser back into occupied space.” If you could bottle distaste, Mara’s expression would have filled a freighter’s hold.

Anakin waited until Luke was off, his X-Wing a reassuring ten meters distant. “I am not spending a week in that ship with eight people. It was cramped enough with just five of us.”

“Five minutes,” Cody said, after they were in the ship with the ramp closed.

“We’ll make it.” Anakin looked at Obi-Wan. “You, sit. We’ll get her in the air.”

Obi-Wan nodded, giving him a brief smile that didn’t do a thing to disguise the fact that his eyes were bloodshot from exhaustion. “Not actually going to argue.”

“I’ll stay with him.” Kam leaned against the wall near the seat Obi-Wan had slumped down on. “At least we’re not trying to shove copies of me off of any more rooftops.”

“You’re doing fine,” Obi-Wan told him.

“That’s because I’m faking it,” Kam admitted.

“Trust me. Faking counts,” Anakin said. Ahsoka, Cody, and Mara followed him to the cockpit, but Anakin heard Wolffe tell Rex, “Fight you for the gun.”

“Zeb says that thing kicks like a fucking rancor. You can have it, brother.”

Climbing into the atmosphere with an X-Wing as a wingman was a surreal experience, especially given who was piloting it. Ahsoka was in the co-pilot's seat, Mara was at the nav station, and Cody was cursing under his breath as he got the comm up. “Let me hear it, Cody,” Anakin said, just in time to spy a bright but short burst of flame jetting out of the top of the nearest SD.

“I got the power station, I got the power station” a male voice was singing.

“Dammit, Hobbie, that was _my_ shot!”

“Eat it, Wes.”

“Gentlemen, no sexual harassment over the comm,” Luke cut in.

“Hey, Ex-Boss!” Anakin recognized Antilles’ voice courtesy of Vader’s obsession of killing every Rebel survivor of the first Death Star battle. “Want to help us take out the second SD?”

“Captain Ghulam?”

“We’re still in the fight, Knight Skywalker,” Ghulam replied. Imperial defector, not long after Alderaan. “Minimal damage to the _Tatius_ and no combat losses on our side except for two spaced pilots. Oh, and you made it with thirty seconds to spare.”

“It will be a lot easier to pick up our people if we’re not being shot at.” Celchu, Anakin thought. The southern Alderaanian accent was distinctive.

“Raring to blow up another power station, Ex-Boss.”

“Not if I get it first, Gauntlet Lead!”

Anakin glanced at Ahsoka, who shrugged. “Would you actually stay out of the fight if we said no?”

“With a bunch of unknown pilots on both sides? Yes,” Anakin countered, which left Ahsoka staring at him in surprise.

“Just go blow up the damned destroyer,” Mara snapped in irritation.

“Yes, ma’am.” Anakin toggled the comm speaker in front of him. _“Figment_ here. We’re game to help, if you want us.”

 _“Figment?”_ Luke repeated, sounding amused.

“Not my idea, but hey, it works,” Anakin said.

“Who the hell are you?” Antilles asked.

“Someone who’s going to make your day really damned awkward later.” Anakin grinned. “There are representatives from the Spectre group with me.”

“Hooo.” That was Celchu again. “The intel cell that’s rumored to have a Jedi with them?”

“Three Jedi, actually,” Ahsoka put in, smiling.

“Holy shit. Corsair Lead here. Let’s go blow the hell out of that SD, I want to meet Jedi who are _not_ actually crazy.”

“I have some bad news for you,” Jade said in a dry voice.

“Guys, we’re digressing. The power station you hit, Gauntlet Lead—which section is that?” Luke asked.

“Just forward of the bridge. We could lay down heavy damage, but they’d probably pulverize us if we tried,” Klivian answered. “Too many forward guns that are still intact.”

“Then we go at her belly, Gauntlet Lead.”

“Rogue Lead, that usually means we’re taking flak from the TIEs coming _out_ of the belly.”

“Yeah, but all it takes is one good torpedo into that hangar, and we’re done for the day.”

Mara sighed. “I don’t know why they want to meet a Jedi who isn’t crazy. They’re all completely insane.”

“Good pilots usually are, Jade. Hey, if you guys want to go for it, we’ll keep the TIEs off your asses,” Anakin offered.

“Wait. Which SD is that?” Cody asked, coming to stand next to Anakin so he could get a better view.

“Interdictor’s down, Corsair Squadron didn’t get its ident.” That was Janson under the Corsair Lead call sign. Anakin guessed folks had finally been promoted. “Rogues? Gauntlets?”

“I got in so close I almost kissed her paint,” a female voice said. “That’s the _Emperor’s Hammer_.”

“Good job, Gauntlet Five,” Klivian said.

“The _Emperor’s Hammer_ is kind of small, isn’t it?”

“Rogue Six, I will break you in half for making me think about that,” Gauntlet Five promised.

Cody was smiling, a fierce, unfriendly expression that could terrify entire battlegroups into shape. “You get me in close, and I can make sure she’s dead in the water in two minutes.”

“Is that you, Commander?” Ghulam asked.

“Yeah,” Cody said. “You going to make me confirm it again?”

“No, that will not be necessary.”

“Two minutes, huh?” Antilles was definitely intrigued. “Commander, we love you already. Looks like we’re swapping roles, _Figment._ ”

“Got it.” Anakin flipped off the speaker and looked up at Cody. “How?”

“Served on that scrap heap for two damned years. She was a rushed refit—her internal data security is complete shit,” Cody said. “All I need is an interrupted flyby, no further out than five meters.”

“So it will be our turn to kiss her paint.” Ahsoka tilted her head. “Well, it certainly won’t be the first time.”

Anakin gave her a narrow-eyed look. “Only happened the once.”

“Twice.”

He turned the speaker back on before that could go any further. “Rogue, Corsair, Gauntlet: We’re skimming in along the aft side for a data dump, heading four-three-seven-one.”

Obi-Wan must have noticed when the _Figment_ changed course. _What are we doing?_

 _Blowing up an SD, Obi-Wan,_ Anakin replied, while figuring out a balance on the shields with Ahsoka that would keep them alive. _Should be done in four minutes._

_Have fun._

Anakin smiled. _I always do._

“All right boys, girls, and otherwise-gendered beings—” Two X-Wings popped in on the _Figment’s_ aft side, with another three on the right. “—let’s keep this ship clean.”

After that, it was kind of anti-climactic. The flight wasn’t hard, aside from dodging turbolaser blasts. The worst of it was a sudden rush to get into a position for Wolffe to pick TIEs off of his wingmates’ asses. Then Cody announced that the upload was complete.

It didn’t take two minutes to shut down the SD. It was powering down with twenty seconds to spare. “Nice,” Anakin said approvingly.

“How long until they get that SD powered up again?” Antilles asked.

“About three hours, if they figure out what’s wrong right away. Plenty of time to clear out the rest of the TIEs and then pick up your spaced pilots,” Cody answered him.

“Excellent. Squadron leaders, the _Tatius_ will be sending out crews the moment you’ve cleaned up,” Ghulam said. “Commander, if your vessel would like to board, we’re ready whenever you are.”

“I haven’t slept in days, so I’ll take that invite. Unless you want to stay and blow things up,” Cody added, looking at Anakin.

Anakin shook his head. “I’ve been running on adrenaline. I’m happy to let someone else clear out the drek.”

“Understood, _Figment._ We’ll see you onboard shortly.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

[You are not serious.]

Luke smiled, initiating landing procedures for the X-Wing. “Yes, I am completely serious. It’s him, Artoo. Well, actually, it’s _them,_ but I figured I’d mention one thing at a time.” It hadn’t taken long to help with most of the mopping up—the remaining TIEs had gone down in flames or retreated to the powered-down destroyer to hide in its hangar bay.

[Would you be upset if I electrocuted him?] R2-D2 asked.

“Yes, Artoo, I would be a little bit upset by that.” Luke waited for confirm from the tech before landing. “Why would you want to do that, anyway?”

[Vader.]

“Okay, I understand that, but two problems—he isn’t Vader anymore, and there are a lot of people who’d like to do the same. I’d really like it if you didn’t lead by example,” Luke said. “What’s really bugging you, buddy?”

[I can’t say.]

That got his attention. R2-D2 had no problems expressing himself. The difficulty often lied in getting him to _stop_. “Why not?”

[Protocol T3X-118.]

“Which…is?” Luke asked, when R2-D2 didn’t say anything else.

[A safety protocol. It can only be rescinded by my master.]

Luke smiled. “Uh huh. Well, then, you sneaky droid: Rescind Protocol T3X-118 and tell me what’s bothering you.”

There was a short pause, and then R2-D2’s translated binary filled the screen: HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME SHE DIED SHE DIED SHE DIED SHE DIED SHE DIED HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME HE LEFT ME SHE DIED SHE DIED SHE DIED—

“Oh. Whoa, hey, it’s okay, Artoo,” Luke tried, but R2-D2 ignored him, still repeating the same two phrases. His droid was so locked up by whatever was wrong that Luke had to handle the landing on his own. It wasn’t a hardship or anything, but usually he had to argue with R2-D2 about who was going to handle which part of the process.

As soon as he was on the ground and the engines were cycling down, Luke popped the canopy, ditched his helmet, and swung himself up to perch next to R2-D2’s astromech socket. R2-D2 was filling the air with some of the most mournful, distressed sounds Luke had ever heard from a droid. Even the techs were staring at them.

Luke sighed and patted R2’s rotating dome. “Come on, at least get out of the X-Wing, okay? I’ll even do it myself,” he said, waving away the tech who was approaching with the normal R2-unit extractor.

R2-D2 self-ejected without stopping his binary lament. Luke used the Force to get him down onto the hangar floor, where R2 proceeded to zip back and forth along the length of the X-Wing like a pacing humanoid.

“Astromech’s having a malfunction, huh?” the closest tech asked, pursing her lips at the display.

“He’s upset.” Luke hopped down to join R2-D2. “Being upset isn’t a malfunction. Being in pieces is a malfunction.”

“Whatever,” she replied, and started his ship’s post-flight scrub-down.

“Look, Artoo, I’m going over there.” Luke pointed at the freighter, which was on the opposite side of the hangar, ramp extended, and almost crawling with babbling techs. He kept hearing something about a _Kazellis_ , but that didn’t look like any _Kazellis_ he’d ever seen. “You can stay here, if you want, or you can come with me and shout at him.”

R2-D2 thought about it for about three seconds before he raced across the landing bay as the first of Gauntlet Squad’s fighters started to come in. By the time Luke got there, R2 was repeatedly bashing himself against his father’s legs, squawking in anger and what Luke was pretty sure was binary swearing.

Anakin had his arms up, and winced with every strike. “Hey, c’mon—no—stop—ow, dammit!—please stop—”

Luke looked down at the others, who were sitting at various points on the freighter’s entry ramp: Obi-Wan was lying near the top, eyes closed; the red-head that Luke hadn’t been introduced to yet was sitting next to him, lips twitching as if she desperately wanted to laugh but found it inappropriate; the Togrutan Jedi _was_ laughing; the Mandalorians had their helmets off, revealing that yes, they really did look a hell of a lot like Commander Naasade; the white-haired man, Kam, looked like a thousand kliks of bad travel. So did Obi-Wan, for that matter, but Luke had the feeling that Kam’s harsh experiences had been a lot more long-term.

Rex was shaking his head. “Is that really Artoo?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said, without opening his eyes.

Rex let out a low whistle. “Damn.”

“Tough little shit,” Cody murmured.

“He is, yeah,” Luke said, noticing that R2-D2 had stopped trying to run over his father and had dissolved into swearing. “Does someone want to tell me why my droid just had an emotional meltdown?”

“Because Artoo hasn’t had his memory erased since his first year of service.” When Luke glanced at him, Obi-Wan was looking back at him, revealing eyes a lot paler than he remembered. Granted, Luke also hadn’t known that Obi-Wan was a redhead. The long hair was _really_ different, but it seemed to suit him.

Come to think of it, the two redheads looked an awful lot alike. The difference was that the woman was gazing at Luke as if she’d desperately like to break him in half.

“Not since his first year? When was that?” Luke asked.

Obi-Wan thought about it. “5198, I believe.”

“Forty-one years.” Luke looked back at his droid, whose beeping had gone right back around to mournful. “That’s…a long time.”

“Your mother acquired him when she was fourteen. They met your father when he was nine.”

“Nine,” Luke repeated, amazed. “So, when did _you_ meet them?”

Obi-Wan smiled. “Same week.”

Luke heard one of the technicians yell, “Officer on the deck!” and glanced over at the primary corridor that led to the forward half of the ship. Captain Ghulam was approaching, his unflappable mask firmly in place.

Ghulam looked at Luke before dropping his gaze to the eight people on the boarding ramp. “Well, gentlemen and ladies. I was expecting two of you, and instead there are eight of you. May I ask what this is?”

“Uh—” His father gave Luke a helpless look. He had one hand on R2’s dome, which seemed to have been all that R2-D2 needed to calm down.

“A disaster waiting to happen?” Obi-Wan suggested. Cody emitted an amused snort.

“Indeed.” Ghulam studied Anakin, and then Obi-Wan, with a curious eye. “Do you know who I am?”

“Arram Ghulam, former first officer aboard the _Tactical Promise_ ,” Anakin supplied. “Ditched the Empire after Alderaan.”

Ghulam nodded. “Accurate, but information easily obtained. I am referring to my status before the Empire.”

Wedge sidled up next to Luke, with a long line of stick jockeys trailing behind him. “What’s going on?”

“Identity check, I think,” Luke replied, watching as Obi-Wan sat up to give Ghulam his full attention. The woman watched him like a hawk, only averting her gaze when he proved to not be in distress.

“Volunteer Republic army, but I don’t remember where we met before,” Anakin said.

Obi-Wan smiled. “317th, Anakin. That’s Fym.”

Ghulam’s mask cracked. “No. No, please do not start that again.”

“Fym!” Anakin cried, pointing at him. “Yes, I knew I recognized you!”

“Fem?” Wedge asked. “Weird nickname.”

“No, not Fem. F-Y-M. It was an acronym.” Obi-Wan’s smile was getting wider, but Luke didn’t understand why until he saw the playful expression on his father’s face. He knew that look; Leia had one just like it. Han typically cleared out of the area when it showed up.

“How did you earn that, sir?” Tycho asked, and earned a glare from the captain.

“Ghulam earned the nickname while serving in Batch Company under General Zero,” Anakin said, and then grinned widely when Ghulam started glaring at him, instead. “It was the Kello Campaign, second half of the first year of the war.”

“I have got to hear this!” Hobbie exclaimed, gleeful. “C’mon, Captain! You never told us you served in the Clone Wars!”

“For very good reason,” Ghulam muttered. “Gentlemen—”

“Why Batch Company?” Wedge asked. He was looking at Anakin with his flat-neutral expression of reserving judgement. Luke couldn’t exactly blame him.

“Because all of the volunteers for that company came in the same batch,” Cody said. “The name stuck.”

Ghulam sighed in resignation. “Gentlemen, if I say that I believe you are who you appear to be, will you please not tell this story?”

“I dunno, Captain. I think they might need to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Wes put in. “I mean, if we’re dealing with a resurrected war hero, then we really do need to be certain.”

“Might be dealing with a clone, for all we know,” Horn said, giving Obi-Wan a suspicious look.

“Clones.” Obi-Wan sighed. “Oh, that would be so much easier to explain.”

“Yeah,” Anakin agreed. “I’ve tried, and it took me two days just trying to summarize.”

Obi-Wan raised both eyebrows. “Two days is _not_ a concise summary. Granted, I went too far in the opposite direction and summed it all up in seven words.”

“Just seven.” Anakin stared at Obi-Wan. “And how did that go?”

“I am not allowed to summarize anything anymore.”

Luke put his hand over his mouth, stifling a laugh. The amused yet indignant expression on Ahsoka’s face made it a lot harder to keep quiet.

“But!” Obi-Wan continued. “Back to Fym.”

“Yay!” Gauntlet Five, Jenni Pell, was clapping her hands together. “War stories that aren’t _our_ war stories!”

“No,” Ghulam tried one more time. “Absolutely not.”

“I outrank you, Captain,” Cody said, grinning. “Kello Campaign was long string of shit battles, just trying to kill one damned civvie-murdering bastard. There were companies from the 212th, the 317th, the 501st, and the 616th all scattered up and down the line.”

“501st Republic,” Tycho said, and made a high-pitched squealing noise that sounded like a teenager at their first illegal concert. “The 212th Battalion. Guys, I am about to fanboy like an eight-year-old.”

Wes gave Tycho a gentle shove. “Get off my foot and keep the squealing to a minimum, I want to hear this.”

Rex picked up the thread. “All eight companies were holed up behind defensive lines because we couldn’t make any damned headway. It wasn’t just the usual droid army, but a bunch of Kello’s living followers, too. Scumsucking bastards.”

“The living forces spend the next few hours taunting everyone, and for some reason, Batch Company got the worst of it. Potshots, name-calling, nonsense about how they’ll win and string up their innards, burn their homes—you know, the usual,” Anakin said. Luke gave his father an odd look, because if that was “the usual” that Republic forces faced from an enemy, then the Clone Wars’ history had been severely edited on the Alliance side, too.

“Then there’s this sergeant in Batch who apparently decides that he’s had enough.” Anakin nodded at Ghulam, who was still glaring at him. “So this guy jumps out of Batch’s bunker with a rocket launcher already primed, and screams—”

“DON’T say it,” Ghulam barked, which drowned out whatever Luke’s father had said.

“But the good man had just ignited a bonfire,” Obi-Wan resumed the tale, looking Ghulam in the eye with that same wide smile on his face. “Suddenly, there are twelve-hundred tired, angry, frustrated men and women boiling out of cover and rushing Separatist lines…and all of them, to a man, are shouting, ‘Fuck your mothers!’”

Ghulam buried his face in his hands just as the stick-jockey gathering burst into laughter and shouts of encouragement and appreciation. “This is terrible.”

Anakin patted R2-D2’s dome again as the droid snugged in against his leg. “It became the battle cry of the day.”

“We won that battle,” Obi-Wan said. “Brightest point of that entire campaign. Ghulam got a medal out of it, too.”

“And I didn’t hear my own name again unless I was reporting in to command.” Ghulam shook his head. “Thank you for conclusively proving your identities, and reminding me that I really hate both of you.”

Anakin smiled. “Aw, we liked you, too.”

“Ah, but I have immediate revenge at my disposal,” Ghulam replied, a hint of a smile on his face. “I do not understand why, or _how_ you came be here, but that explanation can wait. In the meantime: Rogue, Corsair, and Gauntlet Squads? May I introduce you to the two craziest, most irritating generals of the entire Old Republic Military—Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

There was an immediate uproar, amazement clashing with disbelief. Luke looked at Ghulam, who had a smug expression on his face as he listened to three squadrons’ worth of pilots, and quite a number of hangar techs, practically lose their minds.

 _Well…that will…make introductions simpler?_ Luke thought, bemused.

“For fuckin’ serious?” Gavin squeaked.

“Yes,” Obi-Wan and Anakin said at the same time.

“Aren’t you…aren’t you _both_ supposed to be dead?” Soontir Fel asked, an intense frown on his face. “Order Sixty-Six and the Death Star, respectively.”

Anakin glanced at Luke. _No, no, don’t point that out. People know about myself and Leia, but not that Vader was you!_ Anakin nodded his understanding; Luke felt an intense burst of relief that the projected thought had been heard. Sometimes he could do it, and other times he utterly failed at it.

“Yes, we are also supposed to be dead.” Obi-Wan ran his hand over his beard. “Oh, this is awkward.”

“So how did this _happen?_ ” Wedge asked. “I mean, I get that Jedi do weird shit, my best friend performs weirdness on a daily basis. But this is…well, this is nuts.”

“Myriad circumstances that are baffling even to us,” Obi-Wan said, drawing his legs forward and resting his chin on his knees. “But the important part is that we didn’t do it, and we’re not actually supposed to be here.”

“Shit.” Gavin looked sympathetic, even if there was outright hero worship shining in his eyes. “How long have you guys been…well, not-dead?”

“Little over two years,” Anakin said, pulling his cloak off and bundling it over his arm. The mechanic’s grays were a little surprising, but still leaps and bounds better than black armor laced with life support.

“Two years.” Luke looked at Obi-Wan, raising an eyebrow.

Obi-Wan granted him a brief nod, and then Luke heard, _Later_ in his thoughts.

The word was bright and clear, as easy to discern as audible speech. _Wow,_ Luke said, and was gifted with another smile that was exactly like one of Old Ben’s.

“It’s just occurring to me.” Anakin looked at Luke, curious. “Those five things Yoda mentioned. I wasn’t one of them, was I?”

Luke smiled and shook his head while trying not to chuckle. “No, you weren’t.”

 _“Th’on tif gahn piché,”_ Obi-Wan grumbled. Luke didn’t recognize the language, but disgruntled swearing always had a certain tone.

“Okay, nope, I’ve got one, and I gotta hear an answer to this,” Hobbie said, waving to get attention. The pilot chatter was getting kind of intense, but it hushed when Hobbie raised his voice. “All of us who went through the Imperial Academy for flight training, one of our hypotheticals we were faced with was to figure out how to deal with the final part of the Battle of Coruscant without destroying half the planet.”

Ghulam raised an eyebrow. “The successful landing of a crippled capital ship with no functional engines. The cadets told me it is referred to as the, ‘Hell, _no_ ,’ simulation.”

Obi-Wan was smiling again. “Yes. That was us.”

“HOW?” Tycho wailed. “You have no idea how many times I ran that damn sim! No one ever figured it out!”

“It wasn’t that hard. We just used the repulsors,” Anakin said.

All of the pilots and Captain Ghulam stared at Anakin in disbelief. “You used…a capital ship’s…repulsors…to recover from a fatal orbital failure, an atmospheric plunge at full burn, and then successfully landed the ship in an actual _landing area._ With repulsors,” Hobbie said in disbelief.

“I tried that.” Gauntlet Eight crossed three of his arms in irritation. “Six times. The math doesn’t support it. All of the repulsors, firing at full power, did not have the strength to support a ship that size in-atmosphere.”

“Aw, the poor kids.” Cody was grinning. “They were trying to make them do it with the entire ship.”

Wes’s jaw fell open. “The entire ship?”

“We were only flying half of a ship.” Anakin shrugged. “Repulsors could handle the weight at that point.”

There was a moment of quiet before Jenni blurted out, “Can I have your babies?”

Anakin drew back, eyes wide. “Uh—thanks? But uh, I already have kids, and I’m not looking to make more any time soon.”

“There is enough insanity in my family, anyway,” Luke murmured.

“How the fuck do you land _half_ of a Providence-class destroyer?”

Wedge nudged Luke’s arm, leaning in close before he spoke in a low voice, unheard by the babbling pilots they were surrounded by. “You know, I am trying really hard not to like him. I know who he was, and what he did, and how many times he tried to kill both of us…and I can’t. I like him.”

“Why?” Luke asked, biting back a smile.

Wedge gave him a pointed look. “Because he’s a dork of a stick jockey, just like the rest of us, Luke. Stick jockey to the bone. Also, he acts like you, and that’s so far from the other guy that it’s getting really hard to think of them as the same person.”

“From what I’ve recently been told, they may as well have been different people,” Luke whispered back, aware that Obi-Wan and the redhead were both listening while pretending not to be.

“Huh. Damn. Well, what now?” Wedge asked.

“Now, Rex goes to medical,” Obi-Wan said, nudging the other man with his foot.

“The hell I do,” Rex retorted, just as Tycho started making another high-pitched boiling tea kettle noise.

“Rex? _That_ Rex?” Tycho asked, grinning so wide it was amazing that his face wasn’t stuck like that.

“Oh, hey, yeah.” Luke’s father was smiling. “Guys, this is Commander Rex, 501st, Commander Wolffe of the 104th, and Commander Cody, 212th.”

Cody glared at Anakin while Tycho, Hobbie, Wedge, and at least a quarter of the squad pilots looked like they had just met royalty. “Thanks a lot, Skywalker.”

“You’re welcome,” Anakin replied. “Besides, you guys deserve the adoration.”

“Rex,” Obi-Wan said again, with another nudge. “Medical.”

“I’m not going,” Rex snapped.

“You’re bleeding again,” Obi-Wan said in a softer voice.

Rex lifted his right arm, looking down at the field dressing on his side. The bottom edge was tinged with fresh blood. “Aw, dammit.”

Obi-Wan smiled. “I’m not going unless you do,” he said, which reminded Luke that the man’s arm was still bandaged, and there might be other injuries that Luke didn’t yet know about.

“Bribery,” Rex growled. “Wolffe, help me stand up, huh?”

Ghulam rounded on them in alarm. “You have wounded? Why did you not say so before?”

The woman had a firm grip on Obi-Wan’s arm, which was the only thing that kept Obi-Wan from simply falling right back down on the ramp after he stood up. Luke looked at them in alarm, but the woman shook her head.

Luke nodded back; message received. She still didn’t seem happy about his existence, but as long as she _did_ care about Obi-Wan, Luke would worry about defusing that particular bomb at a later time.

The more he thought about it, the more Luke was certain that he’d seen her before.

“We were decompressing,” Anakin told Ghulam. “It’s been a rough couple of days.”

Ghulam nodded. “That, I understand. Come, this way, both of you.” After a slow trudge down the ramp, the group of four followed Ghulam. Luke’s father stood to one side, his expression speaking volumes about how much he wanted to go with them.

Luke realized he was standing in place, with no clear idea of how to proceed and doing his best not to be overwhelmed. So much had happened in the past few days, and the last thirty minutes has essentially been chaos. He’d learned—or inferred—quite a bit in a very short time, and while none of it was bad, it was also kind of mind-boggling.

“Go ahead,” Luke said to his father, and despite the chatter, his voice carried across the room. At least one of them had a clear goal in mind. “None of us are going anywhere.”

Anakin smiled and nodded before going after the wounded. R2-D2 beeped a few times at his departure before turning around to come and bump up against the Togrutan Jedi.

“Hi there, Artooee,” Ahsoka whispered, wrapping Luke’s astromech in a hug. “Nice to see you again.” R2 chirped happily in response.

Cody gave the droid a swift pat on his dome. “Glad you’re still around, scrap.” R2-D2 blatted a raspberry in response. “Yeah, back at you,” he replied, pulling a device out of his jacket pocket. Luke thought it looked like a remote, possibly to a detonator. “Hey, kid!”

Kam caught the remote in his hands. “People keep tossing me things without warning me first. What is this, sir?”

“Just go over to the viewport and press the green button,” Cody said, smiling and pointing to the port-side viewscreen. “Trust me, you’ll like it.”

Curious, Luke followed after Kam, aware that Cody, Ahsoka, and Wedge were doing the same. When Kam got to the viewport, the northern hemisphere of Byss was visible below.

“Well, here goes,” Kam said, and activated the remote. After a six-second delay, there was a gigantic fireball blooming on the planet’s surface, easily discernible from orbit.

Kam lowered the remote and stared at the distant explosion. “What did I just destroy?”

“That was the base, wasn’t it?” Ahsoka guessed, smiling. “The one we rescued Obi-Wan, Cody, and Kam from.”

“Yeah.” Cody wasn’t smiling, but there was a pleased light in his eyes. “Keeping away from Imp patrols wasn’t the _only_ thing we were doing while waiting for pickup.”

“Wow,” Kam whispered. His eyes were huge, the expression on his face both wondrous and sad. “Thank you for that. I just—the idea that I’ll never have to go back to that place ever again? I…I have no other words. Thank you.”

Ahsoka came forward and gave Kam a hug, which he returned with slow hesitation. Cody clapped Luke on the shoulder and wandered off, probably to find his brothers.

Luke watched Kam, feeling a peaceful certainty steal over him. He’d just stumbled across a truth, a specific step on his Jedi path. It was unexpected, but he also knew it was right.

Kam Solusar was going to be his first apprentice.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> N'eparavu takisit, burc'ya. Ni naasa Imperial. Shi slanari dayn be te prudii. = Sorry, friend. I'm not Imperial. Just getting out of the shadow.
> 
> * * * * *
> 
> Oh hey, so apparently I can mention I'm taking donations and that the info is somewhere else, but if I put the info right here, it's a TOS violation. Because that makes sense and all. For anyone wondering why the fic disappeared for a while, that's why.
> 
> Thank you, AO3, for HIDING THE WORK IMMEDIATELY instead of, you know, maybe sending me a nice warning message. I needed a reason to hate myself today and doubt every single thing related to this venture.


End file.
